


On The Ice

by berlynn_wohl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Americans, Anal Sex, Angry Sex, Antarctica, Case Fic, Depression, Established Relationship, Fight Sex, Geeky, LGBTQ Female Character, M/M, Mile High Club, Murder, Nerdiness, Photography, Portland Oregon, Puzzles, Role-Playing Game, Science, Thanksgiving, Travel, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-20
Updated: 2011-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-05 03:07:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 35,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berlynn_wohl/pseuds/berlynn_wohl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sherlock, I once saw you taste a vacuum cleaner attachment that had been used as a murder weapon, so can we please not pretend that Dungeons and Dragons is too weird for you?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Naturally, Mycroft played the piano. When one strikes a piano key, one produces exactly the note one intends to. One the other hand, the violin is temperamental, nuanced, elusive. John sat on the George III period camelback sofa, an audience of one, trying to look thoughtful while Sherlock and Mycroft played Paganini’s _Cantabile_. He could not have imagined that as they played, Mycroft was envisioning a chain: just as Sherlock had the patience and attention to detail to elicit the most charming sounds from his instrument, so John had the patience and attention to detail to elicit the most rewarding behaviour from Sherlock. Mycroft intended to take advantage of this.  
  
It may not have occurred to John that he was here for anything other than a pleasant evening of dinner and music, but Sherlock knew better. When the piece was finished, Mycroft covered the keys, and Sherlock replaced his violin in its case while grumbling, “Now that we’ve dispensed with the stiflingly formal dinner and mildly pleasant family tradition, can we please proceed to the real reason for your invitation?”  
  
Mycroft could see now that Sherlock had not bothered to warn John about a potential “real reason.” John looked to Mycroft, whose smile was frigid but tolerant. “One day, Sherlock, I will invite you to my home with no ulterior motive, no offer of an intriguing case, and no need of your unique abilities. One day, we will have a simple family gathering, which is something I am told ordinary people occasionally enjoy. Of course, it will then fall to you to _accept_ such an invitation.”  
  
Mycroft motioned for Sherlock to have a seat next to John on the sofa. Then he excused himself from the room for a moment, returning with a stack of folders, each stuffed thickly but tidily with documents.  
  
“A former colleague of mine has brought to my attention a mysterious death.” Mycroft sat in a club chair near the sofa and flipped through the folders, searching for the one he wanted to hand over first. “And I don’t use that word lightly; you know that to myself and my colleagues, few deaths are truly ‘mysterious.’ I wish to enlist your aforementioned unique abilities to find the murderer.”  
  
“You are certain it is a murder?”  
  
“Confirming that is the first step, yes,” Mycroft conceded. “Doctor Nigel McDermott was reviewing some autopsy photos that had been taken at a…shall we say, remote base of operations. The body in question was one Jay Von Wahlde, a waste equipment operator. Drove forklifts and loaders and so on. Von Wahlde was on a field trip, something routinely offered to workers at the base, when he fell prey to high-altitude pulmonary oedema. McDermott did not perform the autopsy himself -- he works at the National Science Foundation headquarters in Washington, DC -- but he was reviewing the file and noticed this anomaly.”  
  
Mycroft pulled a photo from a file and handed it to Sherlock, who stared at it, puzzled. “The man has had a tattoo removed,” Sherlock said. “I can see a bit of it still, but not enough to discern what the original design was.”  
  
“There would be few who could, but McDermott is one of them. Twenty years ago, seven men from the First Battalion Parachute regiment were sent to a very sensitive location, as a favour to a very sensitive country that had very sensitive needs.”  
  
Though neither spoke aloud, John and Sherlock each compiled lists in their heads of possible settings for this favour, considering the time period. Gawakadal? Georgia? Nagorno-Karabakh? Panama? Lebanon? It could be three dozen places. Mycroft continued:  
  
“After the engagement, which was a complete success, the seven men commemorated the occasion by getting matching tattoos. The imagery involved did not reveal in any way the nature of their assignment.”  
  
“And one of the tattoos had been removed from this ordinary waste equipment operator,” John said, merely voicing what Sherlock had already supposed.  
  
“Indeed,” said Mycroft. “The face, in these autopsy photographs, does not match the face of any of the seven soldiers. We attributed that to cosmetic surgery, accounted for six of the men, one being McDermott, and so have concluded that the lowly EO must have been the seventh: Paul Royer.” He handed a folder to John. “Here’s his file. Immaculate military record, retired in 2002 to work for Aegis.”  
  
John recognised the name. “Aegis, as in the private security contractor Aegis?”  
  
“Precisely. The Pentagon hired Aegis in 2004 to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq. Over fifty companies either are or were involved in the effort; Aegis was the management hub for all operations, and Paul Royer was the management hub of Aegis.”  
  
John passed Royer’s file to Sherlock, who glanced over each page.  
  
“Royer disappeared quite suddenly ten months ago,” Mycroft continued. “He left no clues to his whereabouts, no messages with loved ones, not a shred of a hint as to why, where, or how. It was assumed that he did this for the same reason a dozen other men of comparable status have disappeared.”  
  
Sherlock looked up from the file. “His commendations say ‘Do what they tell you and do it well,’ but his most recent psych eval says ‘whistle-blower.’”  
  
Mycroft nodded. “Royer witnessed the shoddy execution of shoddy contracts which left much room for corruption. We _suspect_ that Royer intended to bring to light a conspiracy he’d uncovered, by a London-based Egyptian tycoon, to take over Iraq’s mobile phone network. At this point we have mainly conjecture, but if his situation was at all typical, after a string of attempts on his life, Royer decided to fake his own death, change his identity, and go into hiding. When he disappeared earlier this year we told his family he had been eliminated by insurgents, due purely to chance rather than political motivations. We suspected there was more to it, but he did such a good job covering his tracks, he would have been lost to us entirely if he hadn’t gotten himself killed where he did.”  
  
Sherlock’s aloof gaze fell on Mycroft. “And where, precisely, was he killed?”  
  
“McMurdo Station, the American research facility. What I’m asking you to do, Sherlock, is to solve Antarctica’s first murder.”  
  
John frowned. “I understand that MI-5 would want to be involved in this, what with Royer having been a British national,” he said, and looked to Sherlock, then Mycroft, then back, watching their expressions as he spoke and trying to puzzle out why their involvement was imperative. “But since this technically took place in an American territory, won’t the Americans want to maintain their jurisdiction over -- ah, I’ve just said something terribly naïve, haven’t I?”  
  
“We will welcome the Americans’ help, as soon as it is needed,” Mycroft said. “But for the time being, we cannot have _any_ organisation on the ground in McMurdo. What Royer knew, and who he planned to tell it to, is all conjecture. The Egyptian tycoon and the mobile network? A hunch. The key to finding out what’s being planned, who’s involved, and whose interests are being threatened lies in finding out who is responsible for Royer’s death. We’ve got to start with his assassin, find out who paid him, and follow the money until we can determine who had the most to lose if Royer blew their cover.  
  
“And as much as the Americans would delight in sending Navy SEALs to storm McMurdo and use ‘advanced interrogation techniques’ on every boffin and lorry driver in the facility, solving the murder will take slightly more finesse. Right now the assassin must still be at McMurdo. We know this because Royer’s death occurred after the first flight in at the beginning of the summer. My erstwhile colleague happened to see the autopsy photographs shortly thereafter, and since then, all flights out have been delayed, to prevent anyone leaving. The personnel scheduled to leave for Christchurch have been vaguely informed that it’s some sort of logistics foul-up, which they are all too ready to believe, as McMurdo is a notorious bureaucratic nightmare. So long as the assassin thinks he’s gotten away with it, the path of least resistance will be to keep his head down and quietly leave when the season is over.  
  
“But while assassins are often the product of years of special training, ‘wet work’ remains the lowest rung on the intrigue ladder. If Royer’s killer gets an inkling that there is an investigation going on, he most certainly has instructions to take whatever steps are necessary to avoid capture or interrogation. And considering his location and mobility at this time, those steps basically amount to suicide.  
  
“Therefore, the utmost tact will be required to apprehend the assassin. We can’t have the military or ordinary law enforcement trampling all over the base and causing a fuss. The investigation must be conducted in this enclosed space, by the fewest people possible, in utter secrecy. All actions being taken, including your assignment to Antarctica, will be done without the cooperation of any personnel who are physically at McMurdo.”  
  
“And now you’re talking about our being sent there as if we’ve already agreed to it,” Sherlock sneered.  
  
“Sherlock, there is simply no time for you to be obstreperous about this. McMurdo’s fly-in period is almost over. There is only one flight left from Christchurch, and it leaves in forty-two hours. After that, no personnel will be flown in for five months.” Mycroft produced two boarding passes. “You must be on flight 2049 at six-fifteen tomorrow morning, for your flight from Heathrow to Christchurch, with one stop in Singapore.”  
  
John eyed the tickets warily. “I was on board with this idea a minute ago, until I realised that I would have to endure two twelve-hour flights with Sherlock.”  
  
“I am a pragmatist, John, but I am not cruel. Flight 2049 is a private jet, not commercial, which should lessen somewhat the inevitable misery of travelling with my brother. Your five-hour flight to McMurdo, however, will be with the civilian rabble. One must keep up appearances.”  
  
Mycroft looked at John as if to say, _Go on, you know how to make him do things_.  
  
John thought that going to Antarctica sounded exciting. He imagined himself staggering through blizzards, sleeping rough on a rugged frontier, treating all sorts of novel and gruesome medical conditions in the most hostile environment on Earth, never certain whether, in a month or in an instant, Mother Nature would consume him and his companions in her fury.  
  
He wasn’t sure Sherlock would buy in on those premises, however, so instead he said, “I’ll bet they’re doing all sort of interesting research there. Maybe you’ll have time to look in on it.”  
  
“That’s quite true,” said Mycroft. “Even if the two of you can identify the assassin in the first five minutes, you will be residing at McMurdo for about five months. Transport between fly-in periods is for emergencies only, and, as I have already made clear, you will be ordinary civilians as far as anyone is concerned. So assuming you make quick work of the case, Sherlock, you will have plenty of time for research. You might not be captivated by McMurdo’s astrophysics, geospace, or glaciology programs, but I’ll wager you’ll find what’s going on in their Organisms And Ecosystems program quite interesting. Genomics, adaptation, population dynamics. All of which is, of course, facilitated by the absolute bleeding edge of forensic technology. Not to mention, McMurdo is itself a fascinating study in frontier social control. No one with the least interest in human behaviour would ever be bored there.”  
  
Sherlock clasped his hands under his chin and gazed into the fireplace. The case wasn’t very interesting. A single politically-motivated killing. And Antarctica was probably a dreadfully dull continent. But he could feel the excitement pouring off John, and if it would make _him_ happy…  
  
Mycroft splayed his hands impatiently on the remaining folders in his lap. “I need your decision now, Sherlock.”  
  
“I’ll do it,” Sherlock sighed. “But only because it means I won’t have to spend Christmas with you.”  
  
Mycroft smiled. “I can always count on you to do the right thing…eventually.”

 

 

_A/N for you nitpickers: There may have been one real-life murder in Antarctica, at the South Pole in May of 2000. But whether the death was an accident, suicide, or murder has not been conclusively proven. Soooooooo I called this “Antarctica’s first murder” to be dramatic._

  



	2. Chapter 2

Mycroft gave John a list of items they should bring, and how to bring them: a box or two each of whatever possessions they would want to have for the next five or six months, which would be shipped separately; and a duffel bag each of things that they would want for the next fifty-five hours or so. ‘Toiletries’ was on the list, and they were running low on a few things, so John popped down to the shops and left Sherlock to box up his things.  
  
When he returned, he found that nothing had been packed, and Sherlock had the curtain pushed back and was gazing out the window.  
  
“I’m not sure I could stand us being apart for six months,” Sherlock said dreamily.  
  
John set the shopping down and gingerly approached Sherlock. “We won’t be. Mycroft is sending both of us. Thought that was made clear.”  
  
“I don’t mean you. I know very well I couldn’t stand you and I being apart for six months. I meant London. To lose touch with her for so long…she might never forgive me.”  
  
“You’ve not changed your mind…?”  
  
Sherlock flicked the curtain back into place. “No. But travelling like this is not going to be easy for me.” He turned to John. “You might begin to find me a little difficult to deal with.”

*********

John had never been in anything like the spacious Gulfstream jet that awaited them at Heathrow. He wasn’t sure he’d ever even stayed in a hotel so posh. The upholstery was spotless and the lighting was soft and incandescent. Up front were a few rows of first-class seats, then a couple of booths, like in-built breakfast nooks, with leather cushions. There was a desk with a computer and phone, and behind that two sofas and a bar. There was more further on, but John couldn’t see it from where he was standing. An attendant showed him and Sherlock to seats in the lounge, and offered them beverages.  
  
Mycroft arrived before the tea and coffee did. He’d brought with him all the documents and information they’d need to prepare themselves for a summer at McMurdo. He handed each of them files and brochures, one at a time, as he spoke.  
  
“McMurdo is a research station, but it is also the logistics, supply, and waste management hub for the entire U.S. Antarctic program. The majority of the people who work there are support staff, and are not government workers but rather contract employees of the Raytheon corporation, McMurdo’s largest contractor, which is based in Denver.  
  
“You’ll be on the final ‘winfly’ flight from Christchurch. Winfly is the six-week period between August and October when the station is repopulated for the summer season. There will be nothing unusual about your arrival, but you will need to look like ordinary civilians, occupied with ordinary jobs, in order to maintain your cover. These pamphlets will elaborate on McMurdo’s functions and accommodations. I’ve secured a room for you in the Upper Case Dorms, which are the most desirable, and typically reserved for people with either seniority or an influential friend at Raytheon. Your excuse for having these rooms will be the status afforded by your respective occupations.  
  
“Sherlock, you have a position as a forensic analyst waiting for you at the Crary Research Laboratory. But you won’t be assigned to any team, and you will not answer to anyone at McMurdo. Your nominal superior will be someone from the NSF in Washington, DC. You will have access to all of McMurdo’s laboratories and facilities, plus your own private office. You can read this on the flight: it’s everything you need to know about what you’re supposedly doing, which perfunctory duties you’ll need to perform to keep up appearances, and which names to drop if anyone questions you. Most of your ‘work’ will be automatically generated here in London and sent to Denver to satisfy their bureaucrats.  
  
“John, you’ll go as a GP. Being a physician at McMurdo is a lonely business, as most of the workers there refuse to see a doctor about even the most trivial ailments. They all live in fear that they’ll be invalided home without their bonuses. You will see some patients, and have more genuine work to attend to than Sherlock will, but faking work is more difficult, anyway, isn’t it?”  
  
John took his folder and brochures. “I’m sure I can handle seeing a few patients while I’m there.”  
  
“Sherlock, your position means you’ll have access to all the lab equipment at the station. John, your position will give you access to all the personnel files. Between these two data sources, you should be able to conduct any necessary research to determine the true cause of Paul Royer’s death and the identity of the assassin.  
  
“I believe that is all I have for you,” Mycroft concluded as he stood up, “except to advise you to enjoy this flight, as it will be your last taste of luxury for six months. At least eat some fresh fruit.”   

*********

Once the plane was in the air, and they were informed that they could move about the cabin, John and Sherlock stared at the stack of papers that Mycroft had left them, which sat on the opposite row of seats. “So,” John said, clearing his throat. “We can look over all this data. Or, we can check out the bed situation.”  
  
Sherlock looked at the papers, then to John, then back at the papers, like he couldn’t decide which was more appealing. His custom was to abstain when he was on a case; but was he officially on the case yet? And anyway, although Royer’s file was there, and the information about his job at McMurdo, the majority of the stack looked to be corporate brochures for Raytheon and psychobabble about coping with life in Antarctica.  
  
“If it helps you decide,” John said, “we have two twelve-hour flights. We could dedicate one to the bed and one to the data.”  
  
Sherlock unbuckled his seat belt. “John, I’m sure I hardly say it enough, but I do like the way you think.”  
  
The curved, padded interior of the plane was beige, the furniture was beige, the fixtures were beige. John felt like he was in a late-1960’s science-fiction film. And, unlike every other flight he’d ever been on, everything smelled pleasant and looked touchable. Behind a thick curtain was a full-size bed with -- of course -- white and beige pillows and blankets.  
  
Sherlock didn’t think much of the mystique of the jet set. But he could see the curiosity and excitement in John’s eyes, and he certainly was not against indulging any new fascination John happened to have, including one with airborne decadence. He shrugged off his clothes and lay naked on the bed, rolling about and mussing the bedcovers in an attempt to look langorous. He grinned invitingly at John, who could only laugh at this, which is why Sherlock had done it. He knew John found it endearing when he was a bit silly, and a little effort at pleasing John went a long way towards getting what he himself wanted.  
  
John had seen Sherlock rolling languidly in bed plenty of times, but only in _their_ bed, in their dim, cramped bedroom. In the Gulfstream’s clean, bright interior, the light hit Sherlock’s body in new ways, set off new angles, gave his nakedness a plush, alien purity.  
  
The parts of Sherlock that were visible when he was fully dressed made him look like a smirking alabaster statue, and this made John all the more appreciative of the parts of him that were _not_ usually visible, the parts that made him look like a man. The crisp, dark pubic hair; the scattered, tiny moles; the scars, by turns ragged and surgical; the charming pink marks where his clothes had faintly cut into his skin. And when his cock was hard and curved toward his belly, and his balls were drawn up tight, and his thighs were parted, John could see the crease, just a hint of Sherlock’s most private area. He didn’t need to have Sherlock spread out with his arse in the air; he could press his fingers into that crease and feel about, explore the pliant, damp warmth of him that way.  
  
“God, you’re beautiful,” was all John could say, as Sherlock curled his toes and rubbed his cheek against the sheets. “I wish you could see yourself right now. See how gorgeous you look.” John gazed fondly for a moment more, before his face suddenly lit up. “Wait! You can. I brought a camera! Don’t move.” John ducked out into the lounge, and returned with a rucksack, from which he produced a silver digital camera.  
  
Sherlock curled himself up, horrified. “You can’t take pictures of me naked!”  
  
“It’s digital. I can take a picture, show it to you, and then erase it. No worries.”  
  
Sherlock considered this. “Do I get to take pictures of you as well?”  
  
“Why not.” John got undressed while Sherlock examined the camera. The first picture he took was of an almost-naked John grimacing and tripping over himself trying to get his socks off while standing.  
  
“Sherlock! That’s not what -- erase that picture right now!”  
  
“You’re really not much fun,” Sherlock said, pushing buttons. John tumbled onto the bed, and before he could protest Sherlock straddled him and leaned over to take a close-up picture of the ragged scar on his shoulder. The entry-wound scar on John’s back was clean and surgical, but in front, next to his collarbone, a longer incision was surrounded by the pink, puckered legacies of bullet fragments.  
  
“Oh, that is so typically morbid,” John muttered as Sherlock grinned at the display screen.  
  
“I though this was about showing each other how _beautiful_ we are.” Sherlock said the word “beautiful” as though he were describing a fungal infection. “Well, this is what is beautiful to me. If I ever meet the bastard who put that bullet through you, I’ll shake his hand. He sent you to me.”  
  
Sherlock shuffled his way down John’s body. As he did, the soft, sparse trail of fuzz that ran from his sternum tickled John’s cock, eliciting a stir from it and a shiver from John. “But I suppose that’s not what you had in mind.” With his free hand, Sherlock stroked John’s cock to full hardness, punctuating his efforts with a few warm breaths. Then he took a picture of it, from below.  
  
“Mother of Jesus,” John said when Sherlock showed him the picture. “I didn’t need to see that.”  
  
“You’ve always been very modest about the size of your penis. I don’t think you understand how big it is. You’re only able to look down on it, so it seems smaller to you. But it’s really delightfully long and thick.”  
  
“…Thanks?”  
  
“This not going the way you expected?”  
  
“Give me that,” John said, snatching the camera away. He pushed a grinning Sherlock onto the mattress, and managed to snap a picture of him with that mischievous, playful expression, his curls askew on the pillow, his arms up in a half-protective gesture.  
  
“Now _that’s_ a photograph.” John sighed when he saw how well it had turned out. It would be such a shame to erase this one. The most fleeting and elusive of Sherlock’s expressions, the authentic smile, captured here for him to savour at leisure, whenever he wished.  
  
“Please let me keep this one,” he said, unable to take his eyes from it.  
  
“Not part of the deal.”  
  
John frowned. He sat back on his heels, pondering what he wanted to take a picture of next. He really did want to show Sherlock how lovely he was to look at. Sherlock knew how to sham and how to manipulate people who found him attractive, but he didn’t consider himself genuinely “sexy.”  
  
“Lie on your stomach,” John said. Sherlock laid himself flat, but that wasn’t what John wanted. He directed Sherlock’s pose, so Sherlock ended up propped on his elbows, with his knees spread and legs folded, his feet in the air and his ankles crossed. Between the curve of his lower back and his bent knees, his gluteals were bunched, making his behind even more delectably rounded, his buttocks slightly, invitingly parted.  
  
“Don’t look back at me,” John said. “Look over there, out the window. Like you don’t know I’m here.”  
  
“Why on Earth would I lounge about in this position if someone wasn’t in the room with me, telling me to do it?”  
  
John shifted about behind him, to get Sherlock’s whole, compacted, folded body in the shot, and as soon as Sherlock shut his mouth, he took the picture. Yes, it was a bit of an obvious cheesecake pose, but in the soft light Sherlock was a sight to behold. For a brief moment, John reeled, thinking, _I can’t believe this is mine_.  
  
He showed the picture to Sherlock. “What do you think?”  
  
“Oh, God.” Sherlock turned eight shades of pink and hid his face. “I’ve never seen my own arsehole before.”  
  
“You can hardly see it,” John said, re-examining the screen. Then, he put the camera down and leaned over Sherlock, whispering in his ear: “And anyway, it’s beautiful, just like the rest of you. It’s how I get inside you. I push against you there, and your body opens up for me.”  
  
“Mmm.” Sherlock lifted his face so he could look at John out of the corner of his eye. “Can you make movies with that camera?”  
  
“Em, yes, but the card’s only got a few gigs, so there’s room for maybe 20 minutes of video.”  
  
“That will be enough. Let’s make a movie of us having sex.”  
  
“Are you serious?”  
  
“I am always serious.”  
  
John sat up, smirking as he flicked the dial on the camera to the “Movie” icon. “Are you ready to go right now?”  
  
“Did you bring any lube?”  
  
John rose, leaving Sherlock reluctantly, and went back to his rucksack. After some rummaging, he held the bottle of lube aloft, like it was a gadget Q had given him that had turned out to be quite handy. He tossed it onto the bed, then looked for a suitable place to set the camera. The plane was not that wide; the opposite window sill would do nicely. He placed it there, then leaned over to try to see the display, make sure the whole bed was in view. He pressed the shutter button and hopped back in bed.  
  
“Since there’s only twenty minutes, do you mind if I don’t take too much time preparing you?”  
  
Sherlock nodded. John squeezed the lube onto his fingers while Sherlock decided what position he wanted to be in. At first he spread himself out on his stomach, but then changed his mind and got on his back.  
  
The lube was warm, because John always took the time to get it warm, but he made quick, if gentle, work of getting Sherlock ready. No teasing, just working the muscle loose and listening to Sherlock’s encouraging murmurs.  
  
“Stop looking right into the camera, Sherlock. That’s just weird.”  
  
Sherlock turned his head instead to watch John slicking himself with lube. The wet, subtle sound of it went straight to his lizard-brain; that sound meant he was about to be fucked. “I wish I could take a picture of this,” he said. “You, looming over me, stroking your enormous cock.”  
  
John rolled his eyes. “My cock is not enormous.”  
  
“You saw the picture,” Sherlock said.  
  
John was somewhat conscious of the fact that he was on camera, but to keep himself from being put off he concentrated on how good Sherlock would look. He feared that Sherlock would try to put on a show, and end up making it all look silly. But he behaved very naturally. Everything he did turned John on twice over, first to see it and feel it, and then to imagine how it would look later, from a new angle, when they watched the video.  
  
John got a hand under Sherlock to tilt his pelvis, so he could more easily work his cock in and out. “Is it alright? Did I prepare you enough?”  
  
Sherlock pushed back enthusiastically against John and began to play with himself much sooner than he normally did. “It’s good. I want to come already.”  
  
“We just got started.”  
  
“I know, but I need to come.”  
  
John tried to slow their rhythm, but Sherlock was dictating it now, digging his heels into the mattress and grinding his hips to get John into him. “Calm down,” John begged. “Don’t come yet.”  
  
“I can’t help it. You know how to hit all my spots.” Sherlock was jerking himself with determination now. “You’re so good at fucking me. I’m going to come right now.”  
  
“Sherlock, don’t you dare come.”  
  
“I’m coming.”  
  
“ _Goddamn it, Sherlock_!”  
  
John tried to avoid the inevitable, but Sherlock knew just how to squeeze and work John’s cock inside of him, and the moment those rhythmic contractions of his body turned more powerful and erratic, John was coming in hard spurts, groaning pitifully.  
  
Mortified, John pulled out of Sherlock a little too quickly, provoking a cry of discomfort, and darted over to the camera to shut it off. “That was ridiculous,” he said. “I was barely in you two minutes.”  
  
“You didn’t have to come so soon, just because I did.”  
  
“I couldn’t help it. You looked so good. And the noises you made…” John collapsed on the bed in resignation, lying next to Sherlock and staring at the ceiling. “Is this what’s become of us? We’re both so good at fucking that it only takes two minutes to bring each other off?”  
  
“It is efficient,” Sherlock said. “But not ideal. However, we still have over eleven hours to redeem ourselves. And while we’re waiting to have another go, we can look at the movie we made. In fact, we can probably watch it ten or twelve times before our collective refractory period is over.”  
  
John looked contemplatively at the camera.  



	3. Chapter 3

New arrivals had been pouring in for six weeks, but this was the final flight of the season for the U.S. Navy Starlifter. The plane, which carried John and Sherlock in its cargo hold, also carried sixty others, scientists and summer workers. These engineers, analysts, janitors, electricians, cooks, and dentists would complete McMurdo’s October-to-February crew of twelve hundred. The plane also carried mail and fresh vegetables and fruits, which the winter-overs had done without since February.  
  
The army had gotten John accustomed to long flights in these sorts of cramped, undignified conditions, but it made him uncomfortable to see Sherlock, usually so dapper and dignified, buckled to his seat in his canvas overalls and puffy red parka, eating a ham sandwich and a chocolate bar from the brown-paper sack he’d been issued, and drinking from a juice-box.  
  
The cabin was warm throughout most of their flight, but the temperature dropped to near-freezing as they approached the runway, which was built not on land but on the sea ice. The voice of the pilot came over the PA, instructing all passengers to zip up their coats and put on their gloves, face-masks, goggles, and balaclavas, for they were all about to get a whole lot colder. Each passenger wore three stone worth of what was termed Extreme Cold Weather gear.  
  
The cargo door opened, and John and Sherlock got their first taste of Antarctica: the taste of diesel. Despite their face masks, their lungs burned with the cold. It was fifty-six degrees below zero, Celsius. Near the runway were a few tiny outbuildings, and beyond, as far as the eye could see, a startling landscape both horrifying and beautiful. Endless plains of snow carved by vicious winds. A honey-coloured horizon, tinged with pink, silhouetting the snow that clouded their vision. John felt so small and vulnerable, he couldn’t breathe.  
  
John and Sherlock shuffled with the other passengers onto a red bus, which trundled a final few kilometres, from the ice shelf to Ross Island, until they were looking out upon McMurdo, an unfinished-jigsaw of drab administrative buildings, steel dormitories, plywood sheds, scattered snowmobiles and bulldozers, and tangles of power lines. Between the lumbering vehicles and the power plant, the station hummed brutally, twenty-four hours a day. Massive fuel tanks and modern laboratory buildings glittered in the sun, which had been rising for the last few weeks and would shine relentlessly until March. Beyond the station loomed the Royal Society mountain range and the volcanic Mount Erebus, two and a quarter miles high and smoking.  
  
As the crowd were herded, waddling, into this man-made muddle, John said to Sherlock, “Are you as scared as I am?”  
  
Sherlock admitted, “My pre-conceived notions of this place were inaccurate. I am positively properly terrified. God, isn’t it _fantastic_?”

*********

  
Orientation was held in the cafeteria, which everyone called the Galley, a relic from McMurdo’s time as a Naval base. The red parkas were hung up, but the sixty-two new arrivals were sweating in the rest of their ECW gear. The orientation was mostly about things Sherlock and John already knew from the books and pamphlets they’d read on the plane. Ground rules were spelled out, and the elaborate recycling program was explained. At the end, a woman from Housing said a few words, and everyone lined up for the keys to their dorm rooms.  
  
As promised, Sherlock and John were assigned to the Upper Case Dorms. These rooms were as utilitarian as any of the other dormitories on the base, with furniture that looked like it had been shipped directly from East Berlin in 1982, but they were a bit bigger, and further from the noisiest machinery. Every UCD toilet was shared by two rooms, but each room at least got its own sink, and Sherlock and John’s room was furnished with a double bed, rather than the usual pair of narrow single cots they’d glimpsed down the hall. This was not completely surprising: in the line for room keys, the sys-admin and cook in front of Sherlock and John had been a married couple, and had been assigned a room accordingly, so why wouldn’t Mycroft have made that specification for them?  
  
The whole scene was like move-in day in a dormitory: one heard the flapping and crunching of cardboard boxes and the squealing of women who’d been assigned their choice of roommate. One dodged the tentative creeps and frantic scuttlings of three dozen other people who had no idea where they were going. Along the corridor were corkboards stuffed with flyers for “80’s Night,” bowling teams, safety statistics, church services, Alcoholics Anonymous, and so on.  
  
John and Sherlock located their room with little difficulty, despite the chaos. To their delight, the key actually opened the door, and they found no one else inside. (Not everyone had not been so lucky, and there was many shouted inquiries about the location of the Housing staff.) The boxes they had sent ahead of them were already there. Clothes, towels, books, papers, Sherlock’s violin, their laptops, and forty-one boxes of nicotine patches. Also, the skull.  
  
The Crary Lab was expecting Sherlock to report to a special orientation the following morning, but beyond that, because of his unique, independent status, he had no assigned work hours. John’s first shift was two days away, but from then on, he would have one day off every fortnight, and other than that would be in the surgery from 7 AM to 4 PM, and on call 24 hours a day. Not exactly posh doctor’s hours, but then again, John had met another GP in the Galley, who confirmed what Mycroft had warned him about and advised him to get his hands on a handheld video game console, or perhaps take up reading the _Wheel of Time_ series.  
  
Sherlock wanted to get started right away, doing what he came here to do, but the place would be anarchy for days yet. John felt no such urgency. Sweaty and jet-lagged, he stripped away his ECW gear and fell on the bed, leaving Sherlock to unpack, change the clocks on their laptops and phones, and, after John was sound asleep, explore.  
 

*********

 

 

  
Peering out the window, Sherlock saw people milling about with just their red parkas on over their street clothes. The roads and paths were almost entirely free of ice and snow. Sherlock forsook the unflattering bib overalls and comically large white “bunny boots” and strode out in his street clothes and parka.  
  
The dormitory had a laundry room and a smoking lounge with a television, but no other amenities. Looking at the brochure map, he saw that all the recreational and dining facilities were located in Building 155. He would get to that in due time. First, he wanted to stroll the corridors of the dormitory, just getting a feel for the place, and for his neighbours.  
  
Sherlock felt three different sets of vibrations coming off the people he passed as he sauntered about. First, there were the people he’d heard termed “fingees,” the spoken version of the abbreviation FNG: “Fucking New Guy.” Fingees were elated, but confused and frenetic. Second, there were the people who had just flown in but had been to Antarctica before. They were less bewildered, but more aggressive; they knew how McMurdo worked, and unlike the fingees had arrived primed and ready to be frustrated at every cock-up.  
  
Third, and Sherlock’s favourites, were the winter-overs. There were only two hundred at the station, and Sherlock had to concentrate to sense them, though he had helpful visual aids: the tranquil eyes, and the beards. The majority of the winter-overs had both. These were humans who had spent six months in darkness, gradually becoming placid, lethargic and non-verbal as their circadian rhythms were slowly destroyed. Sherlock felt them all emitting the same low, harmonic drone, which was being overwhelmed by the new arrivals’ turbulent piercing chatter. Sherlock resolved to calm his mind and body any time he passed one, out of respect.  
  
Down the road was Building 155, which housed the Galley, pottery studio, bowling alley,  gymnasium, darkroom, library, barber, and a shop that sold tacky souvenirs, DVDs, vitamins, shaving cream, memory sticks, sweets…everything, that is, except condoms, which were distributed for free. Sherlock inspected each of these facilities, building the three-dimensional map of McMurdo in his mind. He spoke with any person who didn’t look too busy and seemed to know what was going on; there were not many of them.  
  
His last stop was the Galley, where he’d been earlier that afternoon. There, he saw a bearded man standing by the swinging doors to the kitchen, leaning on a hand-truck, writing something on a clipboard. Sherlock approached him timorously.  
  
“I beg your pardon...?”  
  
The man with the clipboard looked up, but not quite at Sherlock.  
  
“Hello. I’m Sherlock Holmes, I’m studying tardigrades and wormy nematodes in the Crary Lab.”  
  
The man nodded solemnly. “Tom McGann. Supplies.”  
  
“I’ve just arrived here, but I can see by your beard and your…low-key manner…that you’re a winter-over.”  
  
Tom grunted and gave an affirmative shrug. Sherlock looked him over, and saw that the man had a green star pinned to his wool hat.  
  
“ _Ĉu mi povas demandi punktojn pri McMurdo_?”  
  
Sherlock perceived that he had said the right thing, or at least had said it in the right language. Tom seemed to be roused immediately from his winter zombification.  
  
“ _Bonvole_ ,” said Tom.  
  
“ _Dankon. Mi_ _ĉ_ _iam contenta renkonti Esperantiston. Ĉu estas pli_ _ĉ_ _i tie? Kie ili kunvenas_?”  
  
“ _Ne. Sola vi kaj mi_.”  
  
“ _Estas bedaurinda. Sed mi vidos vin_ _ĉ_ _irka_ _ŭ_ _._ ” Sherlock continued in English. “I’m afraid I’ve exhausted my Esperanto. But can I ask you one more thing? It’s so inconvenient to have to suit up every time you leave your dorm, and then leave your parka lying about where any hooligan could take it. Are there really no skyways or tunnels between buildings?”  
  
“I know, I know,” Tom said. “McMurdo doesn’t have the sense God gave a mall in Toronto. But it’s not so bad. You learn how to move between the buildings efficiently. You’ll plan every trip outside, and put things off so you can clump your errands together. And never again will you forget to take anything with you.”  
  
“I see. Well, thank you for your time.”  
  
Deciding he’d seen enough for the day, Sherlock intended to return to the dorm to wake John up so they could get a meal. But as he left Building 155 and trudged down the road, a forklift passed him on the right, then slowed. It was driven by Tom McGann.  
  
“Sherlock, right? Want a ride?”  
  
“I’m all set, thanks.”  
  
“Free tours for fingees today. Hop on.”  
  
The forklift did not have a proper passenger seat, so Sherlock sat where one would have been. Tom explained that he was on his way to one of the warehouses, and would take Sherlock along because he seemed like a nice guy, and this particular warehouse was “a hoot.”  
  
As they trundled down the dirt road, Sherlock said, “Aside from the fact that I asked you about skyways and tunnels, can you tell me all the other clues I gave you that I’m a fingee?”  
  
“To start with, your street clothes. You look like an Armani ad. Around here, that’s like seeing an astronaut at the ballet. Second, your parka is pristine. It looks like it was issued to you about ten minutes ago.”  
  
“Ah.” Sherlock examined the scuffs and stains on Tom’s parka, as Tom continued.  
  
“Third, when you left the Galley you shocked yourself on the door. It’s because the air is so dry; everything shocks you. You haven’t learned yet to get into the habit of touching something grounded, or pushing doors open with your hip.”  
  
Tom drove Sherlock to a cramped loading dock, where they left the forklift and proceeded into a cavernous network of warehouses, some busy and crammed with crates, others neglected and nearly empty. In one, outdated computer equipment rose fifty feet in a beige heap. In another were rows of massive cardboard boxes, each stack sealed up except for the top ones, which were all open and half-full of smaller boxes of sticky notes, pens, paper clips.  
  
Some rooms were boring: copper wire and plumbing supplies. Others were interesting: Sherlock saw a fruit fly in a top-floor office populated with army-surplus furniture. It had been his understanding that there were no insects in Antarctica, but now he knew there was at least one. He would need to find out if there were any pesticides stored in McMurdo, so he would know whether to rule that out as Royer’s cause of death.  
  
Tom showed Sherlock the MAPCON system. MAPCON stood for Material, Planning, and Control. It was a database that tracked the arrival, departure, and use of every item that came off a boat or plane at McMurdo. Sherlock watched Tom enter his password to log into the system, and filed it away for later.  
  
The most disconcerting of the warehouses, though, was the food storage. “McMurdo serves four thousand meals a day in the summer,” Tom shouted over the sound of palette loaders zipping by, “and we don’t get any supplies between February and August. We have to have enough for our anticipated needs, and plenty more in case something goes wrong. You know. Plus, there’s lots of food that just doesn’t get consumed. Who’s going to eat all these crates of frozen hot dogs from 1967? But we can’t dump it at the edge of the sea ice, like they did back in the day. So it sits around here.”  
  
Indeed, Sherlock saw crate after crate with dates stenciled on them that indicated that the hamburger patties inside were older than him.  
  
“Is it true there’s a greenhouse, as well?” Sherlock asked. “Can they grow fresh vegetables here?”  
  
Tom happily took Sherlock to the greenhouse, where a wide variety of plants were being grown in Perlite and vermiculite. Sherlock carefully examined the arugula, chard, tomatoes, onions, and herbs while Tom chattered. “We grow enough veggies in the winter so that everyone wintering over can have one salad every four days. Beyond that, you know, it’s frozen chicken and canned beans all around.”  
  
Sherlock didn’t see any questionable plants being grown, no _Perilla frutescens_ or _Melia azedarach_ or _Astragalus species_. Tom did mention that about once or twice a year someone got caught growing marijuana, either in the greenhouse or elsewhere, with pilfered equipment.  
  
After the tour, the two men made their way back to the main road, where Tom and Sherlock would go their separate ways. Along the way, Tom asked, “What did you say you were here to study? Haematomas?”  
  
“Nematodes.”  
  
“Ah. I thought you might be here because of that guy that died.”  
  
“Someone died here?” Sherlock deadpanned.  
  
“A few weeks ago. His name was Jay. He was an EO, nice guy I think, but he worked a different shift, so I didnt get to know him or anything. Anyway, he went out on a boondoggle and had a pulmonary thing. Where your lungs fill with fluid? Because of the altitude? He was way up at Arrival Heights, so they couldn’t get him to the medical building in time.”  
  
“That’s terrible,” Sherlock said. “Do people die of that often, here?”  
  
“No, that’s pretty rare. More than anything, people die in industrial accidents. You know, crushed by a vehicle, bulldozer falling through the sea ice, stuff like that. Oh, and one time, the guy didn’t die, but I watched my buddy get clocked with a friggin’ hammer. He was arguing with a carpenter about which was the best disco in Christchurch, and the guy just went berserk on him. Another guy tried to intervene, and he got the claw end to the face. It was the nastiest thing I’d ever seen. It was in the winter, so HR could fire them, but couldn’t send any of them home. They all just spent the rest of the season hanging out here. It was super-awkward.”  
  
“I’m sorry, you said Jay was at a ‘boondoggle’?” Sherlock imagined some sort of needlessly expensive construction project at Arrival Heights.  
  
“Like a field trip. It’s just a trip out of town where you get to see some penguins or a glacier or something. Let me give you a tip: Old-timers like myself -- I wouldn’t do this, but some guys do -- they put out fake sign-up sheets to screw with the fingees. Don’t bother signing up for ‘Swim With Antarctic Cod’ or ‘Mount Erebus Ski Trip.’“  
  
“Understood.”  
  
“Looks like this is your stop,” Tom said, leaving Sherlock at the Upper Case Dorms. “ _Ĝis la revido!_ ”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Sherlock found the “beakers” (the neutral slang term for the science staff) to be quite cheerful. They were all obviously immensely chuffed about their work, and though they had done it many times before for Distinguished Visitors and curious staff members, they delighted in giving Sherlock a tour of the state-of-the-art facilities. He saw real-time monitoring of Erebus’ volcanic activity, aquariums full of luminescent wiggly things, and the pride and joy of McMurdo’s pride and joy, the Ob Tube, a walk-in tube of steel and glass which had been sunk ten feet into the sea, from which one could observe sea creatures as they went about their business in the murky depths.   
  
The tour took half the day, as Sherlock asked questions relentlessly, and his tour guide, an assistant who worked in the electronics lab, was only too happy to answer each one thoroughly. “Are you sure I’m not taking up your time with all of these questions?” Sherlock asked after the third hour.   
  
“Not at all. We’re on Antarctic Time, here.”    
  
Sherlock had heard people refer to the leisurely pace of life on tropical archipelagoes as “Island Time,” so he inferred that the assistant meant the same thing.   
  
Between the analytical chemistry labs and the research library, Sherlock was so excited he almost forgot that just about every person he met was, possibly, a hired assassin. Sherlock made mental notes of the engineer whose calluses were consistent with frequent firearms use, anyone who claimed their work was entirely in the civilian sphere but whose appearance or bearing was military, and the tour guide herself, whose hands were stained by chemicals even though she ostensibly worked in the electronics lab.   
  
As the assistant showed Sherlock to his office, she remarked, “When I saw that you’d be getting your own office, I figured your CV must be pretty prestigious, but I did a LexisNexis search for you and didn’t see that you’d published anything.”   
  
“Well…” Sherlock tilted his head coyly and drew out the word for effect. “Not much that I’ve done is publishable, you see. At the risk of revealing too much about my past work, I might mention that my assignment to Antarctica was an overreaction on the part of my superiors. I had asked them to send me someplace cold…as I was tired of the heat of the Nevada desert.”   
  
“Oooh.” The tech smiled at Sherlock, who could almost see the visions of little green men dancing in her head. “Well, you’ve seen everything, so I’ll leave you to it. Here are your keys.” 

*****

By their third day at McMurdo, Sherlock was already able to identify eighty-seven people when they were in full ECW, based on their gaits and distinctive hats. He didn’t know what was behind every door yet, but he was opening just about every one he encountered, some with impunity, others clandestinely. (McMurdo had no CCTV.)  He also poked and prodded at the edges of MAPCON and various other drives and databases, just seeing what he could get away with.   
  
While Sherlock laid this investigative foundation, doing what he did best, John spent his first two days doing what _he_ did best: finding things that would keep Sherlock from going insane during their stay. He was only going to start really worrying when the case was solved, but an ounce of prevention and all that. He checked out the bulletin boards in the dorms and on Highway 1, but those weren’t much help; Sherlock did not consider bowling, dancing, or trivia nights to be either remedies for boredom or a worthwhile use of his time in general. Nor would he, in the unlikely event that he was invited, be inclined to join a band that played 70’s rock covers. John did make a note about the yoga group, although he acknowledged, to himself, that he was mainly motivated by his own desire to see Sherlock successfully assume the Scorpion pose.    
  
On his third day, John reported to the surgery. He was greeted by a middle-aged blonde whose desk was littered with penguin memorabilia. John may not have had Sherlock’s powers of deduction, but he had no trouble spotting the low-level staff who were here for the wildlife.   
  
The receptionist glanced at John over her reading glasses. “Are you the new GP?”   
  
“Yes, John Watson. Good to meet you.” He held out his hand, and she put a folder into it.    
  
“I’m Trish. You’re just in time, hon. There’s an eye infection in exam room two.”   
  
John was a little put off by her brusque manner, but remained cheerful. He’d feared that he’d be dealing with a ward full of frostbite, and would spend the next six months telling people he’d need to hack off their extremities. A bit of pinkeye was nothing at all.   
  
What he was not expecting was the sight of a young man with his eye sealed shut because half his face was yellow and swollen with pus. It was certainly not the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen, but it gave him a start.    
  
“Chad Morelli,” John read from the file. “You’re in Fleet Operations? Looks like you, er, had a little mishap during an excavation?”   
  
Chad’s speech was only slightly impaired by his swollen face. “There’s a new building going up, down near the sea ice. I was drilling so we could put the foundation in, and the drill hit a crate of sausages.”   
  
“Sausages?”   
  
“They were probably dumped there in the sixties or seventies. Everywhere I drill or dig on this island, something turns up from fifty years ago.”   
  
John perused the file. “So you took some pre-historic sausage slime to the face.”   
  
“Right in my eye. I just wiped it away with some snow and kept drilling, once we’d got the crates out of the ground.”   
  
“How long ago was that?”   
  
“Yesterday. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine hours ago.”   
  
“Well, Chad, I hardly need tell you you’ve got an infection. Given the nature of the, er, material, I’m going to get a sample of the pus and some blood and test for botulism and a few other things. In the meantime we’ll drain what we can, and you’ll take a course of antibiotics. We’ll notify your supervisor that you’ll be out of commission for a while.”   
  
As John wrote up the lab slip, he remarked, “It wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if you’d seen me straight away. Why didn’t you come here right after it happened?”   
  
“I was hoping nothing _would_ happen. There’s a medevac plane coming next week, for that idiot Murphy that broke his arm. Now they’re gonna can me and send me home!”   
  
John tore the lab slip from the pad and held it out. “I hardly think that’ll be necessary. Just take this to the lab and they’ll do the draws. Things got nastier than they needed to get, but I’m sure the antibiotics will clear this right up. You’ll be fine.”   
  
“It doesn’t matter if _you_ think I’m fine. You’re just a doctor. Once a medevac gets scheduled, it doesn’t mater if I come to you with a fucking splinter. It always snowballs into a bureaucratic cluster-fuck because some jerk-off in HR is shitting his pants about ‘injury metrics.’ I’m gonna get booted.”   
  
“I’m sorry, but if there’s anything I can--”   
  
But Chad had already snatched up the lab slip and stormed out.

*****

John was not sure what the etiquette was on breaking into a mortuary in Antarctica, so he waited for Sherlock’s instructions. And after a week, in the privacy of their room, Sherlock showed John a diagram he’d drawn of the labyrinthine medical building, with all the doors and their varying security levels indicated. Also, the names of all of the medical staff and their respective shifts had been penciled into the rooms they typically occupied. When John confirmed, to his knowledge, that the diagram was accurate, Sherlock instructed him to enter the morgue at five PM, after the day receptionist left but before the habitually-late night nurse arrived. John could exit the mortuary at his leisure through the door to the utility room, which in turn connected to a corridor used only by the janitors. If spotted, he could claim his presence was the result of a prank being played on an unsuspecting fingee. All of the doors he would be using were opened with keys, not electronically, so he wouldn’t be leaving any incriminating data behind.   
  
The mortuary was tiny, with space to store just four corpses. John had heard about the gruesome plane crash back in 1979, that necessitated the use of the food freezer to store bodies.    
  
He examined the notes from “Jay Von Wahlde’s” original autopsy and found it mostly consistent with the body before him: the height, the eye and hair colour, the evidence of laser tattoo removal. Additionally, John noticed some minute facial scarring around the nose and hairline, consistent with cosmetic surgery, but nothing else on the exterior of the body seemed to have escaped his predecessor.   
  
The corpse was pallid, the flesh puckered by the standard Y-incision. John sighed as he realised how much time this was going to take. To re-open the incision; he would need to pull the stitches rather than cut them, and later re-stitch them exactly as they were, so as not to arouse a funeral worker’s suspicion later on. John placed a body-block under the trunk of the corpse so it would be easier for him to open and examine the chest cavity.     
  
According to the file, “Von Wahlde” had effectively drowned when his lungs had filled with fluid. The fluid had been drained during the original autopsy, but the mottled appearance of the lungs was certainly consistent with pulmonary oedema.    
  
The report also mentioned signs of irritation of the lining of Royer’s upper gastrointestinal tract, though this was explained away as the side effects of acid reflux. Indeed, Royer had a prescription for Prilosec. But when John examined the esophagus and stomach, he found the irritation to be more recent and severe than would be present in someone who was correctly medicating their acid reflux. He made a note and moved on.

*****

Meanwhile, Sherlock was holed up in his office. Finding the box of Royer’s personal effects had not been so difficult; as Mycroft had assured them, no one and nothing had been allowed to leave McMurdo since Royer’s murder. It was just a matter of finding out where they were storing all the other cargo in anticipation of the next carrier out.   
  
Royer hadn’t had much beyond the necessities; everything he’d owned in Antarctica fit in two banker’s boxes. Sherlock made notes, listing every item, including the brands. Change of clothes for a week, toiletries, passport, six paperbacks. Royer had apparently just begun one of the paperbacks, as page thirty-two was bookmarked with a meticulously crafted paper gum-wrapper chain. Sherlock opened every bottle and tube in the box, but did not smell or see anything out of the ordinary. He collected samples of each to study in the lab later. He turned out every pocket of every article of clothing, finding items only in the clothes Royer was wearing when he died: his wallet, which contained some cash and falsified identification; a keyring devoid of any keys (they had likely been reclaimed, to be re-issued to his replacement); a wadded-up green metallic gum wrapper; a biro; a receipt from the bar, for a drink costing one dollar and ninety cents; and a memory stick. Sherlock plugged the stick into his computer. It had a six gigabyte capacity, but there was nothing on it. 

*****

Late in the evening, John and Sherlock traded data, and Sherlock made notes.    
  
“Have we made any real progress, do you think?” John said.   
  
“What would be helpful is some sort of passenger manifest for the boondoggle to Arrival Heights.”   
  
“There’s no such thing, unfortunately,” John said. “Arrival Heights wasn’t even officially a boondoggle. There was no sign-up sheet. I overheard Trish talking about it. She didn’t go, but she says it’s something that happens very occasionally here. There’s some sort of special cloud formation, and when it happens, someone at the weather station emails someone at McMurdo, and some bloke with access to one of those Spryte trucks recruits whoever’s not on duty to go catch a glimpse. They were all on their way in twenty minutes.” After a long silence, John continued, “I could ask around if you like, ask my patients if they went.”   
  
“No. There’s no reason to go about asking such a question, unless we were trying to dig something up. I don’t want to raise any eyebrows.”   
  
“You traipse about in three-hundred quid shoes. You’re raising eyebrows.”   
  
“People here dress for _comfort_. Those shoes are what I’m comfortable in. And that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Everyone around here has some quirk. Now shut up for a while and let me think.”   
  
John got in bed with his laptop, ready to watch a DVD he’d checked out from the shop, but he hadn’t even started the thing up before Sherlock began to speak again.   
  
“The empty memory stick interests me. There was no laptop among Royer’s personal effects, which means either he used the memory stick to store things from the public computers, in which case why wasn’t anything stored on it…or, the killer stole or destroyed the laptop and erased the contents of the memory stick, in which case why not steal or destroy the stick?”   
  
“If there is a laptop,” John said, “and we do find it, that could be the key to discovering why Royer was killed.”   
  
“Indeed.” Sherlock got up to use the toilet. In the manner of those who are either in a comfortable long-term relationship or who simply don’t understand boundaries, he continued to talk as he did so. “Of course, that part is not our job. We’re only here to identify the assassin. Unfortunately, that may be the most difficult--”   
  
The door had been left slightly ajar, and John leaned over to peer through it, but saw nothing. “The most difficult…?”   
  
A moment later, he heard a scream. “John! John! Oh God, what’s happening?!”   
  
John barreled into the room and found a very distressed Sherlock, standing over the toilet, zipping up. He pointed at the toilet bowl. John leaned over to look; the water was caramel-coloured.   
  
“How much water have you been drinking?” John asked, now as much irritated as concerned.   
  
Sherlock knew that the truth, “basically none,” was not the right answer. So he said, guiltily, “A bit.”   
  
John held Sherlock by both shoulders and looked him in the eye. “You know I have always tried to get you to take better care of yourself, and you have always scoffed at my advice, especially when you’re on a case. But this is not a joke. You have to drink _lots_ of water. This place is literally drier than a desert. It’s sucking the moisture and minerals right out of you, and having a humidifier in our room is not enough. You should always have a bottle of water with you, alright? I’ll go fill one up for you right now.”    
  
John went back out into their room, muttering, “Jesus, you scared me half to death…”

 

  



	5. Chapter 5

Psychologists call it “lack of status identification.” At McMurdo, a person’s life off the ice was completely forfeit. Anything you were, anything you owned, any friends you had or organisations you were affiliated with before you came to Antarctica simply disappeared, and you started again from the bottom of life. For some, this was dreadful, for others, desired or necessary. For Paul Royer, obviously, it had been the latter.  
  
Most people willingly give up their status for a chance to see Antarctica. The man who cleaned the toilets in the medical building was a marketing executive from Indianapolis. And it was hardly an effort for John; he’d already had plenty of practice as a soldier, sublimating his identity, and he understood how to maneuver through human interaction that was reduced to the most basic level: how do you handle stress, do you have a sense of humour, how long have you been here.  
  
But having been at McMurdo a month, he felt increasingly terrible and selfish for having pressed Sherlock to come, because he hadn’t just forfeited his own status; he had forced Sherlock to forfeit his. Now he feared for Sherlock, whose entire identity was wrapped up in his intellectual abilities and his occupation. None of those basic questions mattered to Sherlock: How do I handle stress? Who _cares_? Do I have a sense of humour? It makes no _difference_! Sherlock was The Work, inside and out, but here he could not even mention that, or else their cover would be blown. Sherlock was a non-entity at McMurdo.  
  
At first, John could console himself that even if Sherlock could not be perceived by others as a genius investigator, he could still use those abilities, still see _himself_ as a genius investigator. But Intelligence With A Capital I didn’t work the same way here, and Sherlock was finding it exceedingly difficult to build a new information network at McMurdo from scratch.  
  
McMurdo was so hierarchical, the divisions of labour so rigid, that it was nearly impossible for Sherlock, as a “beaker,” to gain the trust or confidence of the most valuable sources of information: the Galley workers and janitorial staff. The “grunts” were so wrapped up in their jobs, dispensing meatloaf and transporting human waste, that they had not the time to acknowledge the beakers’ existence. Meanwhile, the scientists, for their part, were too excited about their work to notice that their presence required the efforts of hundreds more people to feed them and clean up after them. Sherlock found himself suspended between these two worlds, barely able to benefit from either of them.  
  
These twelve hundred people, stranded in a remote installation on a hostile continent, fell into cliques easily enough, but seemed determined not to form anything resembling a community. Even when Sherlock tracked down a mechanic’s “lucky bottle opener” for him, and found out for an electrician who his wife was sneaking off to the band room with, he couldn’t wrangle something from them as simple as who had been in the Spryte going to Arrival Heights. Instead, when he poked and prodded for gossip, he got useless tripe along the lines of: “Megan’s annoyed because Joy’s perfume gives her a headache, so she told Sondra in HR that Joy lets her crew take extended breaks, so Sondra wrote Joy up and now Joy and Megan have a piece of cardboard taped up to separate their workstations.”  
  
Despite “Von Wahlde’s” sudden and untimely death, Sherlock was surprised and disappointed to find that there was little talk of him around McMurdo. This was mainly because there were too many other bizarre things occurring at the station. Even a death would be swamped within two weeks under new developments like the plumber who got drunk at one of McMurdo’s “theme parties,” fell out of a dorm window, and broke his arm, all while dressed as a zombie drag queen with a Barbie doll cling-wrapped to him. (His conjoined twin, he later explained.)  
  
Conversation at McMurdo, in the first few weeks in particular and afterwards with slightly less intensity, centred almost exclusively on sex. Whether in the Galley, the bar, a smoking lounge, or any random corridor, discussion focused mainly on where every single woman at the station fell on a sliding scale of availability. In an enclosed space that was two-thirds men, this data was of supreme importance. Of the least potential were lesbians, then heterosexual women in long-term relationships, then the ones in short-term relationships, and of course at the top were women who were single and “looking for it.” As far as where any given married woman’s place on this scale was, it did not seem to make a difference whether her husband was also at McMurdo or whether he was back in the States.  
  
Once Sherlock understood how things worked, he kept an eye on nuzzling couples at Gallagher’s, McMurdo’s bar and the second biggest social hub after the Galley. He pointed them out to John one night as they sat at a table together, alternating glasses of water with pints of a New Zealand beer called Export Gold.  
  
“Those two,” Sherlock said, pointing.  
  
“No,” John protested, “not those two, look: They’re both wearing wedding rings.”  
  
“That means nothing.”  
  
“But they match. Both rings are silver.”  
  
“No, they don’t. His is some sort of Celtic design, and hers is plain. A man’s wedding ring is never more elaborate than his wife’s.”  
  
“She’s his ice-wife,” said Tom McGann as he passed. “That’s what they call it. Sorry to eavesdrop.”  
  
“Not at all,” Sherlock said, and introduced Tom to John. Tom’s beard had been trimmed, and his expression was more lively these days.  
  
John asked, “Would you like to sit with us?”  
  
Tom sat down with his bottle of Export Gold. “Jake and Dee. They’ve both been on the ice for ten years. Not ten _consecutive_ years. But whenever they’re both here, they’re together. His wife back home knows about her; her husband back home doesn’t know about him. So it’s a little dodgy.”  
  
John asked, “Does everyone get an ice-spouse?”  
  
Tom shrugged. “You can do whatever you want while you’re here. Well, you can try joining in with the three polyamorous lesbians, but I’m not sure they’d have you.” Tom took a long swig of his beer. “Some people are even loyal to their spouses back home, while they’re here. Crazy.”  
  
Further eavesdropping over the weeks revealed to Sherlock that one reason why some people just kept coming back to Antarctica season after season was the sexual free-for-all Tom was alluding to. Because the gender ratio was so disproportionate, some men went without for long periods, but Sherlock overheard story after story about some or other garbage grunt’s or cook’s brilliant “hail-mary fuck” that never failed to get the other listeners salivating.  
  
Sherlock deleted most of this data, dismissing it as a lot of useless rot that had nothing to do with Royer’s murder. But one night when they were at Gallagher’s, John excused himself to see if he could find “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” on the jukebox, and while he was up, he was approached by a brunette in her thirties who had been on her way back from the bar. Sherlock did what he always did, deducing that she was a childless divorcee who dyed her prematurely grey hair, that back home she was some sort of sales person, probably an estate agent, she’d come here for the penguins, and that she’d already had two -- no, three -- beers that evening, before it occurred to him: she was also chatting John up. _His_ John.  
  
The woman looked over John’s shoulder as he fruitlessly flipped through the jukebox. “Whatcha lookin’ for? I know every song on this thing.”  
  
“Any Elvis Costello?”  
  
“Nope. Isn’t that a shame?” She leaned in closer behind him, gesturing pointlessly at the machine just to have an excuse to get an arm halfway around him. “There’s Squeeze, though, right there. And ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ is near the back. Dunno if that’s close enough for you.”  
  
“Hmm.” John didn’t know if it was.  
  
“You’re the doctor, right?”  
  
“One of the doctors, yeah. John Watson.” He turned to face her properly and offered his hand. She shook it.  
  
“Cindy Briggs. Omigod, but I don’t want you to think that I’m flirting with you because you’re a doctor or anything!” she said, and tilted her head to give her hair a little flip. “I’m flirting with you ‘cause you’re cute.”  
  
John blushed, and when she saw it, she giggled. “Aw, and you just got cuter! Can I buy you a drink?”  
  
“Actually, I...”  
  
Behind him, Sherlock suddenly loomed. He snatched John’s arm, pulling him so that John’s back touched Sherlock’s chest, and snapped at the saucer-eyed woman, “ _Actually_ , you need to find your own, because this one is taken. Come along, John.” As Sherlock yanked him away, John put his hands up and gave Cindy an apologetic look.  
  
Sherlock did not drag John back to their table. He did not even just drag him out of the bar. He dragged him down Highway 1 and to the exterior door of Building 155, where he shoved John into a parka before donning his own. Then he dragged John back to the dorm and into their room. Then he tore some of John’s clothes off, pushed him onto the bed, and made quick work of the rest.  
  
At first, John found the whole thing quite exciting. To have Sherlock so jealous over a pointless bit of flirting that he would break his rules about not having sex during a case. John was rather chuffed, to be honest.  
  
And then there was the kissing. Most of the time, Sherlock was not much for kissing, but now he was going at it ferociously, breathing heavily into John’s mouth, working his jaw as if intending to devour him. He paused for a half-second here and there, to reach for the bottle of lube and apply it hurriedly.  
  
John’s delight was short-lived. He grunted as Sherlock grabbed his hastily-slicked cock and fucked his way inside. Sherlock knew very well that John liked a bit of foreplay. When he bottomed, John wanted to beg a little before Sherlock gave it to him.  
  
“Sher-- _rrgh_! How about a second finger first! _Ah,_ fuck _, grrhh_...”  
  
It was bad enough that Sherlock was not concerned with John’s pleasure, but he didn’t seem to be particularly concerned with his own, either. The most important thing was covering John’s body with his own and pounding away at him to reinforce his claim. “I am on a _case_ , John. Do you understand that I do not have the _time_ or the _energy_ to constantly fuckyou to _exhaustion_ so that you’re not tempted by anyone _else_?!”  
  
John thrashed beneath him, shouting, “What the fuck is suddenly wrong with you!?”  
  
Sherlock’s lust had been sparked by jealousy, but now the flames were being fanned by John’s resistance: the tautness of his muscles, the fresh sheen of panic-sweat, the grunts of effort as he sought to bring the situation under control.  
  
“You are not to spend any more time at Gallagher’s. I don’t like all the slags there.” Sherlock’s thrusts were heavy and erratic, his words hoarse but eerily calm. “If you have sex with anyone else while we are here, I will _know_ it.”  
  
Unable to think of a better way to put a stop to this madness, John slugged Sherlock with a wicked right cross that nearly knocked him off the bed. “Get the fuck _off_ me, you _shit_!”  
  
As Sherlock touched his nicked lower lip, John shouted, “What is your fucking problem? What reason did I give you to think that I was even considering sleeping with anyone else?”  
  
Sherlock crawled back towards John, panting. “I know the truth about this place now. I’ve figured it out.” He made a move to wrap John in his arms, and John let him, but did not relax. “It’s like how a hundred years ago they would give tours of insane asylums, so rich sods could get a cheap thrill looking at the crazed filthy inmates. That’s all McMurdo is. We’re here to watch these people, and every one of them is a sex-crazed lunatic. I have to protect you.”  
  
“By acting like a sex-crazed lunatic?” John’s words were partly muffled by Sherlock’s bicep. “What about you? You only seem to be worried about _me_ being tempted.”  
  
“I’m yours, John.” Sherlock was clinging to him, now, and John had not the heart to push him away again. “I’m bound to you. You’ll never understand.”  
  
“Oh, no? Did it not occur to you,” he said, “that I might feel the same way about you?”  
  
Sherlock swallowed dryly. “It didn’t, now that you mention it.”  
  
“Well, think it through, you stupid bastard.” Their arms still entwined, John rolled Sherlock to one side so he could look into his eyes. He whispered, “That woman. What reason do I have to go to bed with her? What could she do for me? Is she going to put me on my belly and get my arsehole nice and slicked up with her long fingers?”  
  
Sherlock pondered this. “I should think not, with those acrylic nails.”  
  
“Has she got a voice that goes straight down my spine? Can she make me hard by whispering in my ear in a rich, deep baritone?”  
  
Sherlock admitted, “It does seem farfetched, that she would be able to do that.”  
  
“And when I’m on my hands and knees begging for a nice cock up in me, what exactly would she be able to do about it?”  
  
“I’m beginning to see your point.” Sherlock relaxed in John’s arms, though his pulse continued to race.  
  
“Let’s start again,” he finally said. “John?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
Sherlock buried his face in John’s neck. “Will you be my ice-husband?”

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

Strictly speaking, it was not Thanksgiving Day. It was the Saturday after. But everyone got two days off in a row for the occasion, so there was little complaint.  
  
John and Sherlock had never celebrated Thanksgiving before, but they were familiar. They had seen American television programmes and films centred on the feast, and as such, they pictured it as a catastrophic event where people stuffed themselves with food, provided it hadn’t been ruined in a kitchen disaster, and kids came home from university to tell their parents they’d decided they were gay. The Americans at McMurdo whom they spoke to on the subject insisted that it really was much more pleasant than that, but then got vague about specifics. Except for the food; they went on and on about the food aspect.  
  
Thanksgiving dinner was served in the Galley, which was packed wall-to-wall with hungry people in their best clothes; many had brought one formal outfit just for special occasions like these at the station. Beakers, grunts, and even the HR staff were gathered together, though they remained bound to their respective cliques. In a McMurdo tradition, Raytheon’s management wonks heated and served the food, while the regular cooks took it easy. Sherlock and John arrived late, and rather than hunt for a good spot, they just took the closest two seats. On John’s left, and across the table, were three young men and a young woman, all wearing denims or cargo shorts, with t-shirts all bearing the likenesses of characters John recognized from old video games.  
  
“Is it alright, can we sit here?” John asked.  
  
“You _can_ ,” one of them snickered. And another one said, to his buddies, not to John, “You _can_ pick up the sword.” And they all laughed hysterically.  
  
“Sorry, sorry,” the young woman said, and waved at John to sit. “It’s something from our D &D group.”  
  
John blinked. “D&D? Is that a support group or something?”  
  
More laughs all around. “Kind of, actually,” she said. “Dungeons and Dragons.”  
  
The young man next to John said, with no introduction or preamble, “See, there was this cursed sword in a temple. If you touched it, you couldn’t put it down. Well, Andy is not the most intelligent player. He saw the sword lying there, with all the Infernal runes on it, and he goes, ‘Can I pick up the sword?’ And Kyle, he was running the game, he goes, ‘Uh, you _can_ pick up the sword, yes.’ So Andy picks it up with both hands, and now he can’t put it down. So we’ve been trying to find someone who can lift the curse, but in the meantime, he doesn’t have the use of his hands, so someone has to do everything for him, like feed him and help him go to the bathroom.”  
  
The young woman went on: “I suggested that if we stopped feeding his character, it would solve the problem of the _other thing_ we have to do for him, and if he starved to death, then _all_ our problems would be solved.”  
  
One of the young men at the table was blushing. John reckoned that was the dim-witted Andy.  
  
“Anyway, so now when someone suggests doing something foolish, that’s our stock response. ‘You _can_ pick up the sword...’”  
  
The gamers all introduced themselves: Kyle (Mario mushroom shirt and glasses), Devin (Mega Man shirt and ponytail), Andy (Space Invaders shirt and acne), and Jane (Zelda shirt and Russian fur hat, though she was easier to differentiate anyway, having breasts and all).  
  
“That all sounds rather silly,” John said. “I mean, I know Dungeons and Dragons isn’t satanic, but I thought you all sat around a table with the lights off and lit candles and had in-depth discussions about spells and bloodlines.”  
  
Jane rolled her eyes, “If by ‘light black candles’ you mean ‘guzzle energy drinks,’ and if by ‘argue about bloodlines’ you mean ‘repeat tired jokes about the female cleric and her plus-two Orbs of Charisma,’ then yes, your assumptions are completely correct.”  
  
The gamers cheerfully chatted with John, despite his outsider status. Kyle explained that he’d run a games shop in Illinois for three years. When it went out of business, he’d decided to come to McMurdo, to spend a season shoveling snow or scraping turkey loaf out of pans or whatever else needed to be done. After his first summer, he had no plans or obligations back home, so he’d elected to stay on for the winter. After that, he found the idea of going home to no job and no prospects intimidating, so stayed on another year, and trained to be a technician. He now had no plans to ever leave McMurdo, as he had grown terrified of the concept of having to buy his own groceries and look both ways before he crossed the street.  
  
Jane grew up in Appalachia and fought hard against her impoverished background, waiting tables in the Carolinas and West Virginia before deciding she might as well wait tables somewhere _interesting_. She’d met Kyle in the Galley the year before, and they’d become fast friends over their mutual love of table-top gaming.  
  
From there, Jane and Kyle had trekked over to the IT department, where their chances of recruiting a game group were highest. They ended up finding Andy and Devin, brothers who had come at the urging of their father, an erstwhile McMurdo beaker, now retired.  
  
John told them he had been an army doctor, and the gamers immediately asked him if he’d been to the Middle East. He related a couple of shallow anecdotes about camel spiders and the origins of some military slang that was specific to Afghanistan, and they didn’t pry any further.  
  
To Sherlock’s right were some mechanics, discussing gifts they’d received in the most recent mail drop. One pudgy man, whose name Sherlock didn’t know but who was referred to by everyone as “Tits,” was showing off the rainbow-coloured toque his well-meaning aunt had knitted for him. It drew a bit of praise, but mostly ridicule.  
  
Across the table from Sherlock, a barrel-chested man with a ginger goatee spoke up. “Hey man, those hats are no joke where I’m from.” But he was ignored by the other mechanics as they moved onto the next topic.  
  
“Oh? Where are you from?” Sherlock said to him casually, as he poked his fork into a strip of turkey.  
  
“Portland, Oregon.”  
  
“Really!” At this point, John’s conversation with the gamers had lulled, and his attention was caught by Sherlock’s sprightly tone. “I was in Portland for two months doing research on bull trout habitat degradation. God, that was five years ago, now. What neighbourhood did you live in?”  
  
“The Pearl district.”  
  
“That must have been fantastic, to live so near Powell’s! Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”  
  
“Gavin Bruce.”  
  
“Sherlock Holmes. Tell me, Gavin, is Powell’s still the biggest bookstore west of the Mississippi river?”  
  
“I believe it is now the biggest bookstore in the U.S.”  
  
“Well I hope that means that it grew, rather than succeeded another store that was shut permanently. We used to go to…oh, what was that pizza place that’s right next door?”  
  
“Do you mean Rocco’s?”  
  
“Rocco’s, yes! And they have the arcade machine there that has thirty classic games on it?”  
  
“Yeah, that thing’s been there forever.”  
  
“Did you ever happen to play any _Ms Pac-Man_ while you were there?”  
  
Gavin leaned back. “Eh, I’m more of a _Dig Dug_ man, myself.”  
  
“Ah. Well, if you ever go back, take a look at the high score for _Ms Pac-Man_ on that machine. ‘SH 3,333,280.’ That’s mine.”  
  
By the end of the evening, John had stuffed himself with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, though he insisted that doing so was purely in the interest of respecting Americans and their customs. Sherlock had managed to eat the one piece of turkey that he’d poked with his fork at the beginning of his conversation with Gavin Bruce.  
  
The last exchange John had with the gamers was an invitation to join their group, as he seemed “pretty chill.” John demurred, claiming he was too ignorant of the subculture to be worth having, but they insisted they were happy to train him up. “And anyway, you’re British,” Kyle said. “You guys were all raised on _Doctor Who_ , so you’re basically an honorary nerd.”  
  
Back in their room, John collapsed on the bed, full and lethargic. “When I was in Afghanistan,” he muttered, staring blankly at the ceiling, “I met an American soldier who told me that when the, er, the evil fascist secret government took over America, they would do it on Thanksgiving night. He said the reason why was, just about every American goes home for it, so people are all gathered together and it will be easier to find them, round them up, and put them in the…concentration camps or something. Of course, now I see that the real benefit of doing it on Thanksgiving would be that everyone would be too full of turkey and stuffing to fight off the…what did he call them…‘jack-booted thugs.’”  
  
Sherlock sat at the desk, his fingers steepled beneath his chin. John rolled over, to the best of his ability, and said, “Do you really have the high score on a _Ms Pac-Man_ machine in Portland, Oregon?”  
  
“Of course I do. You can’t just lie about something like that.”  
  
“When? How?”  
  
“I had to win a bet to get information out of a bike messenger about three bodies that had been dumped in the Willamette River. I only needed one million nine hundred thousand points to beat him, but you know how I get carried away sometimes. Would have maxed the score out, but I missed a pretzel. Listen, I want you to bring me Gavin Bruce’s personnel file. He’s not from Portland or anywhere near it.”  
  
John shrugged. “He seemed to know a lot about it.”  
  
“Then why did he mispronounce his home state? He said ‘Or-uh- _gone_.’ People from Or-uh- _gun_ may have a reputation for being laid-back, but they can at least be bothered to say ‘Oregon’ properly. Gavin could be lying about where he’s from for any number of reasons, but when you have a suspect pool of twelve hundred, you must take a second look at anyone who makes themselves stand out.”  
  
John hummed agreement and tried to undress without actually lifting any part of himself off the bed. He managed to toe off both his shoes and one sock, then gave up.  
  
“I had an interesting conversation with those kids next to me. They play Dungeons and Dragons. Have you ever played?”  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes. “If I ever knew anything about that ridiculous game I deleted it long ago.”  
  
“It’s just, one of the people in the group works in the Galley, and the Galley is where you get all the gossip at McMurdo, right? Since we can’t hang about all day in the Galley, shouldn’t we try to socialise with people who do?”  
  
“If it’s all the same to you, I will try to come up with a way to connect to the Galley’s social network that does _not_ involve sitting around a table with pimply, speccy children, pretending to cast spells and fight trolls and whatnot. I don’t suppose any of them said anything to you that was actually useful or interesting?…John?”  
  
John was snoring softly.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

Before he’d even gotten near her,  John saw Trish, the receptionist, cover her nose in disgust. “Lord, what is that _smell_?” she shrieked to whomever she was talking to on the phone.  
  
“Trish?” John said, as he came into her line of sight. “Can you tell me where I can get another one of these?” He indicated his white coat, which was covered with the remaining vomit that he’d not been able to wipe off. “They only issued me the one.”  
  
“I’ll call you back.” Trish hung up the receiver. “Oh, I’m so sorry, hon. There should be more in the dispensary. Did a patient throw up on you?”  
  
“I’d be interested to hear what other theories you’re entertaining about why I’m in this state,” John deadpanned. “If you could grab me another coat, that’d be grand. I’ll be back in fifteen; I’m going back to the dorms to change my shirt.”  
  
When he returned, Trish had a fresh coat for him behind the desk. He picked it up, and saw she had a new photograph pinned up, crammed in with all her pictures of penguins. In the photo, a pylon was silhouetted by a sheet of rainbow-hued clouds with an astounding mother-of-pearl texture.  
  
“That’s a new picture. Is that in Texas?” John was referring to Trish’s home state.  
  
“No, those are those nacreous clouds you sometimes get at Arrival Heights.”  
  
“Oh, those are the clouds you were talking about.”  
  
“Yep. Every time the sky up there gets to looking like that, it always causes a fuss. My friend Kimberly managed to get up there to take that picture. She just put a whole bunch of ‘em on the I-drive, if you’re interested.”  
  
“I’ll have a look later, yeah.” John smoothed the collar of his fresh coat, and Trish handed him the next patient file.  
  
As soon as he went off duty, John logged into the computer in his office and skimmed the I-drive until he found a folder labeled ARRIVAL HEIGHTS 2 SEPT 2011 – PHOTOS BY KIMBERLY. The first picture in the folder was of the interior of the Spryte that had taken everyone to Arrival Heights. Kimberly had apparently stood at the front of the vehicle so she could get everyone in the shot.  
  
John printed that picture, and two similar ones after it. The rest of the folder was nothing but the stunning cloudscape. Sherlock had said he’d be at the Lab that afternoon, so John raced over with the pictures tucked in the inside pocket of his parka. He nodded to the beakers, who knew him by now as the put-upon boyfriend of the weirdo from Area 51, and darted down the tiled corridors to Sherlock’s office. Sherlock sat at his desk, waiting for some diagnostic or other to complete. A progress bar crawled across his screen while he examined a petri dish. John plunked down the crinkled pictures. He didn’t need to tell Sherlock what they were.  
  
In ten minutes, Sherlock had identified most of the people in the photograph, scribbling their names over their respective faces.  
  
“Assuming she got all the passengers in this shot, then including Kimberly herself and the driver, there must have been fifteen people on the trip,” Sherlock said as John looked over his shoulder. “These two are obscured by waving hands, but thirteen out of fifteen is a good start.”  
  
“A good start to what?”  
  
“I want you to look into their personnel files, find out what rooms they’re assigned to and what shifts they work. We’ll have a look through their things and see if anything interesting turns up.” He glanced back at John, whose expression was troubled. “Oh, you’re not having another _moral crisis_ , are you? What did you think we came here to do?”  
  
“I don’t know, but not go looking through everyone’s knickers! I figured you would take one look at the assassin and identify him by his belt-buckle or something. You know I don’t like the part where we break into people’s houses and rummage about. That seems like cheating, for you.”  
  
“Well, then you’ll just have to hope that we find compelling evidence in the first room, so we’ll only have violated one poor unfortunate soul’s privacy. Bring me the data and we’ll start tomorrow evening.” 

*****

John and Sherlock’s room had the distinction of being the only one at McMurdo with no decorations on the door. It was customary to put things on one’s door to express oneself, as in a college dorm. Photos, bumper stickers, magazine clippings. Pictures that reminded one of home, like a New England autumn or a sunny street lined with palm trees. Photos of the occupant with loved ones, or holding a prize bass catch. And, in the case of the more “free-spirited,” doll heads, or kitschy vinyl album covers, or a sign that said VOTE WITH YOUR GUM, with chewing-gum-riddled pictures of Star Wars characters beneath it.  
  
John hadn’t put anything on their door because he felt a bit silly about it, but Sherlock couldn’t have put much of anything on the door because, what would there be? Photos of him engaging in a leisure activity, or with loved ones? If any such thing existed, John was unaware. Pictures cut out from magazines of things that interested him? Like what, for instance? A corpse left positioned in such a way as to deliver a cryptic message to an unknown recipient?  
  
The first room on their Arrival Heights list belonged to Geoff, the engineer at the Cray lab with the calluses on his hands. In front of his door was a mat that said _COME BACK WITH A WARRANT_. Sherlock read the mat and then proceeded to disregard it, picking the lock and slipping into the room. John followed.  
  
Geoff’s room was as crammed with books, papers, and gadgets as you’d expect any engineer’s to be. On the wall was a corkboard, tacked full of photos. The largest was of Geoff holding a rifle in one hand and a trophy in the other. Also, there was a Xerox of a peace sign surrounded by the words _Peace Through Superior Firepower_.  
  
“Here we go,” John said. “Bit of a gun nut.”  
  
“Irrelevant,” Sherlock said. “This is just an American thing. And anyway, guns had nothing to do with the way Royer died. I don’t think anyone on this continent even _has_ a gun, except the Russians at the Vostok station.”  
  
“Really? Why do the Russians get guns?”  
  
“So they can shoot each other in arguments over chess, of course.” Sherlock was having a look through Geoff’s desk, finding nothing that seemed to interest him. He checked the mattress to see if anything had been stashed in it, flipped though the Michael Savage books to see if any were hollow, but also just looked at things, reeling off observations to John, who wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be contributing, or taking notes, or what.  
  
“Judging by the state of his socks, he’s too absorbed in either his work or his ideology to clip his toenails regularly,” Sherlock said. What was John supposed to do with that information? Then Sherlock got down on his hands and knees, reached into the carpet pile, and pinched a ragged fingernail fragment between two fingers. “And he chews his fingernails.”  
  
“Well, at least it isn’t the other way round.”  
  
“I don’t think this is our man.”  
  
“You can tell that by the holes in his socks, or the chewed nails?”  
  
“Assassins aren’t in the habit of carelessly scattering their DNA about. Let’s move on. The next room is Gavin Bruce’s.” 

*****

 Bruce’s room was tidy and Spartan; no books, no photos, no DVDs, and no gadgets, save for a laptop. Only one drawer of his standard-issue bureau was in use, and also only one drawer of his desk. Inside the latter were generic McMurdo maps and pamphlets, and a pack of wintergreen chewing gum. Sherlock examined the pack. Three sticks of gum were missing, the rest were still in their green metallic wrappers.  
  
“Why is this important,” Sherlock said to himself. He sat in the desk chair and stared at it for a long while. In the meantime, John pondered the meaning of the bumper sticker on Gavin’s laptop, which said _KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD_.  
  
At last, Sherlock began to speak, and a mile a minute at that. “Royer chewed a brand of gum with paper wrappers; he had a chain of them that he used as a bookmark. But the wadded up wrapper that he had in his pocket when he died wasn’t his brand. It was _this_ brand. Maybe Bruce put something in a stick of gum and offered it to Royer while they were on the Spryte. What causes pulmonary oedema that you can put on a stick of gum?”  
  
John took the pack and examined it. “It would be difficult to poison gum. You can’t slip powder into it, or dissolve anything in it.”  
  
“No, but you could paint it with something. Although that would alter the taste. Cyanide would give it the taste of bitter almonds, antimony is metallic…”  
  
“Plenty of poisons have no taste,” John said.  
  
“The trick will be to come up with two lists of poisons: one for the ones that cause pulmonary oedema and stomach irritation, and another for the ones with no taste or odor.”  
  
“Or!” John’s face lit up. “With no taste or odor _that would interfere with wintergreen_. It could be methyl salicylate. It’s a rubefacient that naturally smells and tastes of wintergreen.” John racked his brain, going back through his pathology studies. Slowly, he continued, “Excessive amounts cause pulmonary oedema and stomach irritation. And, it can be fatal in sufficient quantities. That must be what Bruce put in the gum.”  
  
John’s heart was pounding. Partly because he realised he had made the deduction, but mainly because of the glint he saw in Sherlock’s eyes when _Sherlock_ had realised that John made the deduction. No doubt Sherlock would have come to the same conclusion if given ten more seconds, but that John was the one who’d gotten it first made Sherlock proud -- a little jealous, perhaps, at having his thunder stolen, but that pettiness was overwhelmed by a burst of affection for John and his abilities. If it were anyone else looking at him like that, John would expect the next thing out of their mouth to be _Take me, right now_.  
  
Instead, Sherlock said, “I think we have our killer now. Can methyl salicylate be detected in the bloodstream or in tissue after death?”  
  
“I’ll have to look it up, but I think so.”  
  
“Good. Get samples from the Royer and test for it. I’ve got to pop over to the shop and buy a pack of this gum, so I can replace the sticks I’m going to take from this pack to test. Assuming we can confirm our suspicions, I’ll write up a summary of the evidence and send Mycroft an e-mail, with that encryption software he gave me.”  
  
Sherlock made for the door, but turned back briefly and, leaning towards John conspiratorially, said with a grin, “ _Then,_ I promise _,_ you can take me.”

*****

 When John got the results from Royer’s tissue samples, he sent Sherlock an email, containing one word: _Yes_. (It was no good trying to use a mobile at McMurdo, so whenever they were apart and settled in somewhere, they kept their email open.) He remained in the medical building to catch up on some paperwork, and forty minutes later Sherlock burst into his office, leeringly approaching John like a husband coming home drunk and randy after a night out with the boys. “I was right. The gum was painted with methyl salicilate.”  
  
John leaned back. The way Sherlock had reeled into the room, he half expected to smell booze on him.  
  
“Gavin Bruce is our man! I’ve emailed Mycroft. Now we just have to wait for regular transport to be resumed, and we can get the hell out of this godforsaken wasteland.” Sherlock grabbed John by the arm and yanked him away from his desk. “What are you sitting there for? Let’s go back to our room and celebrate!” 

*****

“Mmm, I am unstoppable,” Sherlock said as they raced down the frozen gravel road to the dorms. “I mean, I am just astonishing.”  
  
"That’s true.”  
  
“Do you know, I have solved cases on six continents now? And if I told someone that, they would assume Antarctica was the one I was missing.”  
  
Sherlock was so pleasantly agitated that when they got to their door he could hardly get the key in the lock. “Let me do it,” John said.  
  
“I can do it. I’m not an idiot.”  
  
As the door finally clicked open, a woman came shuffling down the corridor in her ECW.  
  
“Oh, hi there, Doctor Watson!”  
  
John turned to see a pleasantly surprised Claire, an HR clerk who had visited him earlier in the day hoping for a treatment for “the McMurdo crud.” As the crud was a particularly virulent strain of the common cold, with a cocktail of flu-like symptoms brought from around the world but with no bacterial element, John had been able to do nothing for her except recommend vitamin C and rest. She was a full-time employee of Raytheon, not a contract employee like most of the people there, so she intended to actually rest, as it would not compromise her earnings.  
  
“Hello Claire. I see you got your vitamins.”  
  
“Yep!” She was fumbling with her own key, in the door right next to theirs.  
  
“Who’s this?” Sherlock snapped.  
  
“Relax, she’s just a patient.”  
  
Sherlock eyed her with suspicion anyway, for good measure.  
  
When Claire heard Sherlock’s voice, she clapped a hand over her mouth, but quickly removed it so she could half-whisper, “Are you the one that makes all the noise during sex? The noise that everyone can hear all the way down the hall?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Sherlock said, “does it sound like this?” He placed his palms flat on the wall next to the door, stuck out his arse, and began to bellow, “Oh God, yes, John, fucking give it to me, _ah_.” He continued to wail and curse and writhe for another ten seconds, the longest ten seconds of John’s life at McMurdo. “Oooh, you’re so good, _Christ_ , John...”  
  
Claire’s jaw dropped, and her eyes darted back and forth between Sherlock’s antics and John’s mortification. “ _You’re_ John?”  
  
“Yeah.” John said, fidgeting. “Yeah, I’m John-- _Sherlock can you please stop now_.” Sherlock stood up straight again and said to Claire, “If you got the kind of seeing-to that I get, you’d scream too.”  
  
John pushed Sherlock through the open door, then turned back to Claire and said, “I’m sorry about that. He’s not taken well to this place, so he...acts out.”  
  
“No need to apologise,” Claire said. “Doctor Watson, do you, um, like girls at all?”  
  
“Oh, how I wish you hadn’t said that,” John croaked, as a long pale arm shot out of the doorway and dragged him in by his shirt-front. 

*****

The moment the door was shut, Sherlock had his hands under John's clothes. One snaked round his shoulders to bring him closer, the other went down his trousers, grasping possessively and rather unerotically. He half bent down, half tried to pull John up to him, and went in for a kiss.  
  
But John was fed up. “You know what? Stop. Get your hands off me. Off!” He smacked Sherlock’s hands away and straightened his clothes. “In the two months since we left London, we have been having sex your way. Some girl looks at me twice and you drag me in here, and it doesn’t matter if I want it or not, I’ve got to put your twisted, paranoid mind at ease. I don’t mind a little angry sex once in a while, but I am bastard sick of doing it that way _every fucking time_!”  
  
“John, I’m sorry--”  
  
“No, no you’re not. You say that word, but I don’t think you’re ever really sorry so long as you get your way. Well, tonight we’re going to do things my way. We’re going to have sex like two normal people do.”  
  
“That sounds boring.”  
  
“You can be bored while fucking or bored while not fucking, your choice.”  
  
Sherlock looked away and pressed his lips together, as though he were the put-upon one whose desires were constantly thwarted. He was shaking, his body barely able to contain a powerful cocktail of adrenalin, arousal, and frustration. “Fine. Your way.”  
  
Pleased at having brought Sherlock to heel, John took his time shrugging off his parka, then pulling Sherlock's off of him. He was looking forward both to their traditional celebratory post-case sex, and to putting right what Sherlock had been getting wrong since they'd gotten here.  
  
John undressed himself, so that he might keep all the buttons on his clothes intact and safe from Sherlock's impatience. With neither a cue nor a warning from John, Sherlock did the same, and they did not touch again until they were both on the bed. Sherlock lay on his side, assuming a submissive posture and expression. John put a hand on Sherlock's hip, to feel how hard he was shivering with arousal, and was not disappointed. They both started to get hard, stared at each other's erections, and got harder.  
  
“Tell me how you want it,” John said as he ran the flat of his palm up and down Sherlock's flank.  
  
Sherlock stretched his arms over his head and rolled back. “Like we always do after a case. Put me on my back and mount me. I want my legs on your shoulders. I want it deep.”  
  
“Then deep you shall have it,” John said, and retrieved the lube from the bedside table. He hardly had to position Sherlock, as Sherlock did most of the work himself, lifting his legs up and placing them in John's hands, so John could part them enticingly while he got under and between them. As he pumped lube into his hand, he remarked, “See how easy it is, when you just ask for things?”  
  
John took his time with his fingers inside Sherlock, having a nice feel about and slowly, patiently making everything relaxed and slippery. At first, Sherlock squirmed and made a big show of how impatient he was to get to the fucking, but it didn't take long before John's practiced touch began to feel more like an end than the means. Sherlock just didn't want to admit that the simple brush of a fingertip against one tiny spot inside him could so reliably send tremors through his entire body. But John was meticulous, and with those minute twitches of his fingers soon coaxed from Sherlock sounds of surrender and pleasure.  
  
When he was damn good and ready, and not a moment before, John gently removed his fingers so he could apply the lube to himself. Sherlock lifted his pelvis and repositioned his legs on John's shoulders; as each one shifted, John could feel the stickiness of sweat. Having been so thoroughly prepared, Sherlock opened sweetly to him, and John shifted his hips and arms once, then twice, so that he could get all of his cock in on the first, slow push.  
  
As he continued to give Sherlock this long, patient rhythm, he breathed, “How's that?”  
  
“Harder,” Sherlock ordered. “Do it the way I like it.”  
  
Sometimes John felt guilty just letting loose on Sherlock, like he was treating him like a fuck-toy. But at times, like right now for instance, Sherlock encouraged it, asked for it as hard and fast as possible, until John was the one who felt like a toy, like an automaton programmed to pump away with a relentless, uniform rhythm until Sherlock was satisfied. Beneath him, all the while, Sherlock groaned and grunted blissfully, sometimes stroking his cock, but more often abandoning it to just enjoy what John was doing to his arse. “Oh, it's perfect,” he cried. “You're perfect inside me.”  
  
If he concentrated, he could feel the firm little bump of Sherlock's prostate with the head of his cock, and between that and Sherlock's helpful shrieks of ecstasy, could perfect his aim and make each stroke hit home exquisitely.  
  
“Oh God John. I'm going to come. John. It feels so good. I'm going to come.” Sherlock tended to misuse this phrase; he just meant he was having a good time. Assuming he didn't use any explicit qualifiers, when he said “I'm going to come” it might mean “right this instant,” or it might mean “sometime within the hour.” But the effect of hearing him say it was always devastating, nonetheless. Listening to him, John felt extraordinary desire...but not the desire to continue like this. He looked down between Sherlock's taut, suspended legs, and eyed that neglected cock hungrily.  
  
Sherlock had his eyes tightly shut, and he hardly noticed John taking his cock in a lube-slick hand and giving it thorough, twisting strokes. But he did notice when John stopped fucking him, dropped his legs, and climbed on top of him. It took a little more than the usual patience and effort, as John had not prepared himself, but as Sherlock watched, agape, John sank down on his cock, shifting about so that it was comfortably snug inside him.  
  
“What’s going on? What are you doing?”  
  
“Every time I’m on top, you go on and on about how good it feels to have my cock in you. And it makes me think about how good it feels to have your cock in me. I couldn’t take it anymore. Go on, you had your turn, now fuck me.”  
  
Sherlock was in a panic now. He kept his hands at his sides, as though he were afraid if he touched John, it would just encourage him. “That's not how it works! You can't just swap out in the middle of it!”  
  
John placed one hand on each of Sherlock's shoulders, lifting and lowering himself once, getting a nice feel of Sherlock's hard length. “I could be wrong, but I think I just did. Now would you please plough my arse, thank you.”  
  
Grudgingly, Sherlock lifted his hips and pushed up into John, who made ambiguous noises for a few strokes, until he found just the right angle. He groaned with relief and palmed the head of his cock with a short, twisting stroke as he began to ride Sherlock properly.  
  
“Feel better now?” Sherlock sneered.  
  
John replied, smugly, “Much better now that I’ve got a nice cock up in me.”  
  
Sherlock was still unhappy about this turn of events. He had been quite content with the way things had been going, and now John had mucked it up with his demands. But he had no idea what to do about it, except vent his frustrations. Gritting his teeth, Sherlock grabbed John's hips and began to thrust brutally up into him, trying to give him what for.  
  
Above him, John just smiled and rode harder. He cried out, “Oh God yeah, you're trying to punish me but you're just hitting the sweet spot.” With his fingertips he worked his foreskin over the glans, sweet icing on top of Sherlock’s deep, powerful thrusts. “Give it to me harder, I can take it.”  
  
So then, Sherlock stopped entirely. Which of course had been the sensible thing to do in the first place. Sherlock just hadn't been feeling very sensible a moment ago. He grabbed John at the waist to stop him from moving.  
  
John wriggled on top of him. “Come on, Sherlock, don't stop now. Aren't you still furious with me?” He fought hard against the death-grip on him, and continued to ride Sherlock as he taunted him: “I'm getting exactly what I want and you're not.”  
  
Fuming, Sherlock gave up resumed his brutal thrusting. John was almost laughing now. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, unh, _unh_. Maybe there's something to this angry sex after all. Oh, oh yes, here it comes. Watch me come, Sherlock. Oh, you wanted this in you...” John pumped his cock hard, and three long, thick ropes of spunk landed on Sherlock's belly.  
  
The moment John slumped a bit and let his guard down, Sherlock reached up, seized him, and wrestled him onto the mattress so he could pound him missionary style, smearing John's come until those three pearlescent strands became a wide smudge over both their bellies. “You're a bastard,” Sherlock panted, and came, his final shameful acknowledgement that John had won.  
  
For a few minutes afterward. Sherlock relaxed, making a slight effort not to squash John under him. Though his breathing had to remain shallow by necessity, John was warm and damp and pliant beneath him, and contentment was coming off him in waves.  
  
“So that’s how normal people have sex?” Sherlock said.  
  
“Oh, shut it.”  
  
Sherlock tucked his chin against John’s shoulder, ready to stay cuddled like that for a while longer. But then, beneath him, he felt John’s entre body go rigid, just for a moment. He snapped to full awareness and looked in John’s eyes. They were darting, even as his muscles were deliberately relaxing again beneath Sherlock.  
  
“What’s the matter?”  
  
“Nothing,” John lied. Sherlock eyed him warily but had not the energy to argue, so he said nothing, and returned to nuzzling John’s neck.  
  
John had not the heart to spoil the afterglow with his sudden, crushing realization: The case was over. The last thread connecting Sherlock’s life in London to his life at McMurdo had been cut, and he would be adrift here, with no case, no mysteries, no mental exercise. His brain, having exhausted the paltry fuel Antarctica provided, would keep on running, and burn itself out. And they still had three more months here.

 

  



	8. Chapter 8

At ten AM, the alarm clock clicked on, blaring the detestable cacophonic rock music spun regularly by McMurdo’s radio station. And _someone_ , Sherlock noted as he dragged himself across the bed, had not only set the alarm for him, which was cruel and ludicrous, but had turned the volume up to maximum, so that it could not be ignored. In order to get to the power switch, he had to get past two litre-bottles of water with a piece of paper taped to them.  
  
Once he’d reduced the noise in the room to its default low hum, Sherlock tore the note from the bottles and read it:

  
  
_Sherlock -_   
  
_Please get out of bed today. I signed you up for a boondoggle to the glacier caves at Mount Erebus. The group leaves from in front of bldg 155 at 1:30. I want to hear all about it tonight. Take the camera._   
  
_Also, you have not been drinking enough water. Drink the attached bottles by the time I return from work._   
  
_I love you. Please do these things for me._   
  
_John_

__  
  
Admittedly, it had been eight days since Sherlock had left their room, and John had grown increasingly agitated, coming back from work each evening and seeing him still in his black mood, every day having to work twice as hard to get him to eat half as much food.  
  
Also, it surely hadn’t escaped John’s notice -- Sherlock mused as he briefly tugged the collar of his t-shirt over the bridge of his nose -- that he’d gotten pretty rank. 

*****

At the foot of Mount Erebus, a long, lolling tongue of glacier ice spilled out into the Ross Sea. Inside the crevasses of this glacier were ice caves whose beauty, according to the chattering women seated next to Sherlock in the Spryte, was “indescribable.” The women did, however, spend most of the hour-long trip making a noble effort to describe it, much to Sherlock’s chagrin.  
  
“Denise went, and she said she cried like a baby, it was _sooooo_ beautiful,” one said. “It’s like, the bluest blue ever.”  
  
This was another piece of data that Sherlock didn’t know whether to delete or file away, in case one day it became useful: women apparently cry at _colours_.  
  
The orange truck trundled across the frozen sea. Sherlock was packed in tightly with nine others, all parka-ed and bunny-booted, but he had a window seat. Ignoring his companions, he rested his forehead on the window and watched Erebus spew its sulphurous smoke.  
  
To help him get in and out of the caves, Sherlock was issued a long rope, anchored at one end, and told he’d need no other special equipment. He followed the others, who split into two groups to explore the two most accessible caves on the glacier. Approaching each required climbing a steep incline, then sliding down an icy tube into a cavern about ten metres square. A few people entered and returned, and Sherlock still hadn’t decided which one to approach. He would take a step towards one, then look out upon the blue horizon slamming into the blinding white peaks of the Royal Society mountains, and find himself paralysed. The wind screamed down the mountain, a sound half-animal, half-machine.  
  
Finally, he chose the cave he was told was the larger. Inside, one person remained, on their back, quietly gazing up at the luminous deep turquoise-and-violet glacier ice. Sherlock did the same, sitting on the floor and then lying on his back, finding himself not significantly colder for having done it.  
  
Even the furthest periphery of his vision was filled with the ancient, rolling ice-forms. And once the other person got up and crunched their way out, Sherlock was alone in perfect, frigid silence.  
  
As he stared, his guts suddenly lurched, as happens when one lies supine in the grass and, for a moment, is certain they are falling into the sky. The more he looked into the ceiling of blue-violet ice, the more he felt compelled to continue looking into it. The sight burned through his eyes and into his ribcage. It was so beautiful to him, in an unearthly and deeply unsettling way. The strange, secret majesty of this place stole his breath. His heart raced. He was overwhelmed by an inexplicable urge to make love to John, here in the cave if possible.  
  
And then, confused and devastated, Sherlock began to cry.  
  
Someone had to come get him out, twenty minutes later. Then, once he was standing in front of the Spryte, additional effort was required to actually get him into the vehicle, as he was further hypnotised by the eerie, menacing landscape.  
  
London did not make Sherlock feel small, because he believed he was a part of London, which was big, so he was big by extension. But he did not feel like a part of Antarctica. He stood on an ancient, gargantuan sheet of ice and stared at another ancient, gargantuan sheet of ice, then, when it became too intimidating for him, he tried to turn away, only to be stunned by the sight of the monstrous smoking volcano before him. It all served to remind him of something he almost never wasted time considering: he was a tiny, fragile being, full of tiny, squishy organs, and he was _absolutely nothing_ compared to the slow, massive violence of the planet. He tended to think of himself, and to a lesser extent other people, as complex and powerful beings. But to the Earth, Sherlock Holmes was just one of six billion irritating but ultimately inconsequential microbes that it would some day find a way to eradicate entirely, so that it could get to the business of healing itself. 

*****

John returned at half past four to find Sherlock exactly where he’d left him that morning, entirely underneath the blanket, on his left side. But he’d only managed to utter the first consonant of his curse of frustration before he noticed that the water bottles were empty on the desk, an extra set of clothes littered the floor by the bed, and the camera sat on the edge of the bedside table.  
  
“Did you go out today?”  
  
Sherlock said nothing.  
  
John picked up the camera. There was one new picture on it, of Mount Erebus, as seen through a mud-and-snow-spattered window.  
  
“Did you forget you had the camera?”  
  
Sherlock said nothing.  
  
John yanked the blanket away. Naked, Sherlock curled up into the fetal position.  
  
“I had hoped going out would have cheered you up.”  
  
Sherlock said nothing.  
  
John flicked the blanket back over him and went about tidying up the room. He would be hungry soon. “Are you going to come to dinner? If you are, you should get up and start getting dressed.”  
  
“I’m a tiny, squishy thing,” Sherlock mumbled.  
  
John glowered, but did not wish to struggle with Sherlock in one of his moods. “I’ll bring you back a sandwich,” he said. 

*****

When John had written Sherlock’s name on the sign-up sheet for the glacier boondoggle, he’d noticed two names at the top of the list: Kyle White and Jane Sartori. Presumably they were the same Kyle and Jane he’d chatted with on Thanksgiving. He resolved to locate them after dinner, but when he arrived in the Galley, he found the two of them, and Devin and Andy, sharing a tray full of jalapeno poppers and shuffling pieces of paper about.  
  
“Hello, Doctor Watson!” said Jane.  
  
“Hello. Listen, have you got a minute? You went on the boondoggle today, yeah?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I was wondering if you could tell me...My friend went, and he...Well, did something bad happen out there?”  
  
“Who’s your friend?”  
  
“Sherlock Holmes.”  
  
They both shook their heads.  
  
John held his hand slightly above his head, to indicate height. “Tall bloke, dark curly hair? He sat next to me at Thanksgiving?”  
  
“Mmm.” Kyle remained nonplussed, but Jane blurted, “Oh, the one with cheekbones that make me want to kill myself?”  
  
“That’s...probably him, yeah.”  
  
“Sit, sit,” Jane said, indicating the empty seat next to her. John set down his tray and joined the group. “It’s hard to tell who’s who when you’re outside,” she continued, “because everyone’s got their ECW on, you know? But I know someone today had to be like, friggin’ _carried_ back onto the bus. But I mean, it’s pretty intense out there.” For a moment, she adopted a tone like she was narrating a dramatic nature programme. “Like, _the vastness of the barren Antarctic wastes_. I’ve seen people get majorly freaked out on boondoggles.”  
  
“Not like murderous rampage freaked out,” Kyle added, when he saw John’s alarmed expression. “But like, overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of the universe. The first time I went out there, I was like, ‘Oh shit, I have to call my mom. I have to quit smoking, and feed orphans, and start drinking green tea.’”  
  
John nodded. He had some idea of what was going on, now.  
  
“Wait a minute,” Kyle said. “I think I know who you’re talking about. Is this the guy Cindy told me about? He flipped _the fuck out_ when she hit on his boyfriend. Was that you?”  
  
John nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, that was me, and that was Sherlock.”  
  
“Oh my God, dude, that guy is on the Mayhem Index!”  
  
"The what?”  
  
“The Projected Mayhem Index. It’s this chart we have that tracks the crazy-ass shit people do. You know, like Level One is just the normal bickering and bullshit. Level Three is like, people shoving each other around in a fight about who’s a bigger fan of Jefferson Starship. Level Five is where your boyfriend comes in: injurious violence resulting from extreme paranoia. Normally we only make up a Mayhem Index in the winter, because things only get really weird in winter. But as soon as I heard about this dude, I knew we had to keep track of him. When he finally loses it, it is going to be _legendary_. Hold on, what’s his name again? I’ll write it down. We’ve just been calling him ‘Scarecrow,’ ‘cause he kinda looks like that dude from the Batman reboot.”  
  
John swallowed. “So what are the proper channels round here for…What should I do if my friend’s in danger of going insane?”  
  
Kyle shrugged. “Pop some corn.”  
  
Devin, quiet until now, was a little more helpful. “What does he like to do? For fun?”  
  
John spent a few seconds thinking of an accurate but discreet way to answer. Finally, he said, “He likes to solve puzzles.”  
  
Devin grinned. “Oh, see? He should join our D&D group! It’s Jane’s turn to run next. We’re taking a break for a couple weeks while she writes up a new campaign. She loves to put all sorts of impossible puzzles in her campaigns, and then she gets mad at us for not being able to solve them.”  
  
“You guys, it was so _eeeeeasy_ ,” Andy said, apparently mocking Jane. “All you had to do was ask the statue of the dragon. It was enchanted to answer three questions if you spoke its name, and the name was right there on the pedestal.”  
  
“In fucking Draconic, which none of us spoke!” Andy said.  
  
Jane was going for a jalapeno popper, but dropped it to retort, “Oh, I’m sorry, you guys. How about if in my next campaign, the dragon just gives you the Ring of Invulnerability, and then lies down in the corner and turns its back so, you know, you can just take anything else from the hoard that you want, and then tells you the shortcut out of it’s lair, so you won’t have to fight any goblins on your way out, oh and also you can all swim in plate armor. Would you like that? You whiny bitches?”  
  
John had to laugh. “I must admit, this is all sounding a bit familiar. So what would Sherlock and I do if we wanted to join your group?”  
  
Jane started to write down her room number on a scrap of paper. “Come by and see me. I can get you the books and character sheets and everything you need.”  
  
“I reckon it would be a bad idea for me to come to your room. If Sherlock found out…”  
  
Jane raised an eyebrow. “How long have you been here now? Surely you’ve heard about the Dreaded Polyamorous Lesbian Trio?”  
  
“Someone mentioned something about them, yeah. _Oh._ Oh, I see. But what you said about the cheekbones...?”  
  
“Please. Even a blind, comatose lesbian would be jealous of those. There’s nothing to worry about. Just stop by soon. I want to start the new campaign in a week or two.”  
  
“I will do. Cheers.” John moved to stand, but Kyle said, “Stay, eat. Have a jalapeno popper. We were just discussing what happens when you put a Bag of Holding inside a portable hole. Do you know anything about physics?” 

***** 

John laid a hand gently on Sherlock’s shoulder, not sure if he was awake.  
  
“Sherlock?”  
  
“Mmnnhh.”  
  
“I brought you dinner. Turkey and swiss.” John waggled the cling-film-wrapped sandwich back and forth, as if to make it more enticing.  
  
“Hmnnph.”  
  
“Sherlock, there are two ways you can consume this sandwich. The first method does _not_ involve the use of my extensive knowledge of hand-to-hand combat.”  
  
Sherlock rolled over, took the sandwich, examined it, and handed it back. “Unwrap it for me.”  
  
“Get up. You’re not getting crumbs in the bed.”  
  
“You don’t scare me. They don’t actually teach hand-to-hand combat in the army anymore.”  
  
“Sherlock.”  
  
Sherlock sat up, took the sandwich from John, then just set it down next to him on the bed.  
  
“You want to tell me what happened at the glacier caves?”  
  
Sherlock folded his legs and put his chin on his knees. “Actually, I don’t.”  
  
“Fair enough. I talked to those kids today, the ones that play Dungeons and Dragons.”  
  
“This again.”  
  
“I know it sounds stupid. But apparently it involves investigating intrigues and solving puzzles quite a bit. I know it’s just a game, but wouldn’t having to use your brain for something be an improvement on using it for nothing, like you’ve been doing lately?”  
  
Sherlock stared at the wall.  
  
“Let’s just give it a try. For me?”  
  
Sherlock flung one arm in John’s direction and snapped, “It’s because of you that I ended up on this god-forsaken block of ice at the bottom of the world in the first place!” John was not impressed. Sherlock continued, more calmly: “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll try playing _one time_ \-- but you have to do something for me.”  
  
“Anything you want.”  
  
“Stop going through my things looking for drugs.”  
  
John had tried to be discreet about that, but Sherlock had nailed it.  
  
“I only do that because I worry about you. But, I promise I will stop, if that’s what it takes to get you to do this. If you end up having a good time, then I wouldn’t need to snoop anymore, anyway. I just really think it might be helpful.”  
  
“So what do we need to do?”  
  
“The kids told me they’d loan us a book so we could make characters. How about I go pick it up, and you eat this sandwich while I’m gone?”  
  
Sherlock stretched out and rolled over, turning his back on John. He sighed. “What’s in it for me?”  



	9. Chapter 9

Jane had only one copy of the _Player’s Handbook_ to spare, so John and Sherlock took turns reading it to learn how the game worked.  
  
Dungeons and Dragons was cooperative storytelling. One person, called the Dungeon Master, designed the setting and dictated much of the action, but the other players, who created character avatars, also contributed to the plot, making decisions about which goals to pursue and how to go about pursuing them. In the manner of medieval fantasy, typical adventures involved slaying evil creatures, rescuing people, and recovering valuable objects.  
  
One of the first things the book explained was the fundamental mechanic of gameplay: the D20. It was a twenty-sided die, whose rolls would determine the outcome of most of the actions the players would attempt. If you wanted to attack an enemy, leap across a chasm, haggle with a shopkeeper, or identify a magical object, you had to roll the D20 and add its result to your skill level (Attack bonus for combat, Athletics bonus for climbing, and so on) to determine if you were successful. Dice with fewer sides were also used, but the D20 was the most common.  
  
Sherlock didn’t think much of this mechanic. “You use randomly generated numbers to create a narrative?” he said almost as soon as he’d opened the book. “That’s like… _sport_.”  
  
John sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sherlock, I once saw you taste a vacuum cleaner attachment that had been used as a murder weapon, so can we please not pretend that Dungeons and Dragons is too weird for you?”  
  
The section on character creation was not entirely unfamiliar to John, who had read _Lord of the Rings_ a few times. (If Sherlock had, he never mentioned it.) He recognised the archetypal features of Halflings, Elves, Dwarves, Rangers, and Wizards. He was also intrigued by some of the other character races and classes, like the Cleric and Paladin, both of whom assumed the dual role of warrior and healer. He fancied Sherlock a Rogue, whose specialties were sneaky combat, lock-picking, and detecting traps.  
  
When one created a character, one assigned them a small allotment of points which determined their attributes. How strong they were, how smart, how nimble, how charming, and so on. As the character went on adventures and gained experience, they “levelled up,” becoming stronger, smarter, more nimble, and more charming.  
  
John found the minutiae of combat movement sensible, considering it was a game and needed to be simplified, but worried that he would be expected to memorise every rule. Sherlock, on the other hand, absorbed the chapter easily, confident that he could simply delete all the useless twaddle after the first gaming session, once he’d fulfilled his part of the deal with John.  
  
After some thought, John decided to be a Paladin, as they were paragons of virtue, and John thought that being forced to adhere to a moral code would be a welcome respite from the black-and-grey morality imposed on him in real life since meeting Sherlock.  
  
Sherlock took quite a while longer to decide what he wanted to play, instead re-reading and re-re-reading the manual. After getting over the initial surprise of seeing Sherlock so interested in the book, John reckoned he only desired to exploit every available piece of data, to create a perfectly legal but frustratingly over-powered character. When John had sat at the table with the gamers in the Galley, they had accused Kyle of doing this with his characters. They called it Min-Maxing: minimizing points distributed to what were seen as useless features of a character, so that those points could be re-routed to more desired ones.  
  
When John finally saw Sherlock pick up a character sheet and begin filling it in, he was dying of curiosity, “What’s your character going to be like, then?”  
  
Sherlock kept his eye on the paper, scribbling down numbers. “Oh, you know: Brilliant, insightful, cold.”  
  
John blinked. “This is a game where you can pretend to be anything you want, but you’re going to play yourself? Don’t you delight in being a master of disguise?”  
  
“My character,” Sherlock said, “is also a master of disguise.” 

*****

The gamers all lived in the Lower Case Dorms, which were too small to seat more than two people comfortably, so they couldn’t have game nights there. The Galley would have worked, but the harsh fluorescent lighting overhead and the comings and goings of “savages” (non-gamers) were mood-killers. Devin had suggested instead the lounge in the IT building, which was more comfortable and nearly always empty.  
  
When Sherlock and John arrived, Jane, Devin, and Andy were already there. Kyle was still over in 155, procuring food and drink from the Galley.  
  
Jane sat at the head of the table, with a laptop and a stack of manuals and notebooks. In the center of the table was a plastic mat with a grid of one-inch squares. Dry-erase markers and tiny figurines were scattered about.  
  
“I didn’t know what you guys were playing, so I just brought all the miniatures I had,” Jane said. “Go ahead and pick one that you think looks like your character. Do you mind if I look over your sheets while you do that?”  
  
John handed his character sheet over, tugged Sherlock’s out of his hands, and handed that over as well. Jane examined John’s sheet first, nodding but saying nothing. She handed it back and simply said, “Good, except don’t forget to add your Weapon Proficiency. Paladins are automatically proficient with martial weapons, so you get to add an extra two points to your attack roll.” She placed the sheet in front of him, pointing to the space where the bonus would be noted.  
  
“Ah, indeed, thank you.” John hurriedly made the correction.  
  
“Common mistake,” said Devin. “Don’t sweat it.”  
  
Meanwhile, Jane was now staring at Sherlock’s character sheet. “Oh, dear.”  
  
Sherlock clasped his hands under his chin. “Did I make a mistake?” he asked, quite certain that he hadn’t.  
  
She continued to read. “No, this looks immaculate, actually. It’s just…the class you picked…”  
  
“I thought it suited the type of person I wanted to play. It says here in the book: ‘The heroes of the past whom you hold as exemplars overcame adversity and escaped danger using their wits, by tricking their foes and concocting cunning stratagems. You seek to emulate these heroes, combining your winning personality with a keen intellect.’ That’s my character all over.”  
  
Kyle returned from the Galley, carrying two armfuls of junk food and fizzy drinks. “What’s going on?”  
  
Jane smirked, flipping Sherlock’s character sheet round so Kyle could see it. “Sherlock wants to play a Bard.”  
  
Laughs all round. Except for Sherlock and John, who waited for the joke to be explained. Sherlock stared daggers at anyone who dared make eye contact with him. “Is there a problem?”  
  
Jane handed the sheet back. “Not at all. It’s just that--”  
  
“You _can_ play a Bard,” Andy chimed in, too loudly.  
  
“Yes, thank you. It’s just that Bards are kind of a joke class. In the past they weren’t very powerful. They did a little of this and a little of that, but they had a reputation for being pretty useless.” When she saw that Sherlock looked forlorn, she hastened to add, “They’re fine now. They’ve been significantly improved for Fourth Edition. But if you’re going to be a Bard, you have to expect that the other players will treat you like a freak.”  
  
Sherlock said, “I’m prepared to deal with that.”  
  
Kyle peeked at the sheet. “Oh, and he’s going to be an Elf, too, you guys.”  
  
“Pansy!” was Andy’s knee-jerk reaction. Andy always played a Half-Orc, even if it made no sense for the class he played, and had nothing nice to say about Elves, Half-Elves, or Eladrin. Or anyone that played one.  
  
“Ignore him,” Jane said. “It works. You’ve certainly got the look down.”  
  
Sherlock’s brow furrowed. “I’ve not yet told you what my character looks like.”  
  
“No, I mean _you_. Look like an Elf.”  
  
“He grows his hair long like that to hide his pointy ears,” John said.  
  
Sherlock kicked him under the table. 

*****

It took an hour, from the time everyone had arrived, before the game actually started. A sliver of that time was spent discussing the merits of various character options, like spells and equipment, but most of the hour was spent quoting _The Simpsons_ and _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ , and relating stories to Sherlock and John about past gaming triumphs and blunders.  
  
Not wanting to miss the opportunity to speak to Real Live British People, Andy also asked Sherlock who his favourite Doctor was. Not being interested in popular culture, Sherlock didn’t understand the question. He pointed at John and said, “This one.”  
  
Everyone could tell that he was not being ironic, and they had a good laugh at his expense, which provoked a faint smile from Sherlock. John cringed a little on his behalf. What John had, long ago, thought of as Sherlock’s Smile of Condescension, he now recognised as his Smile of Bemusement. He smiled that dead smile when compelled to make nice with people to get what he wanted, but John also once saw him making that face back in London when one of the Yarders told a joke referencing a pulchritudinous pop star. Later, when John caught Sherlock perusing the singer’s Wikipedia entry, he realised Sherlock had not understood the joke, and so had adopted the Smile of Bemusement: _I have suddenly found myself out of my depth in a social situation, so I’ll smile half-heartedly to make myself look disdainful rather than confused_.  
  
Jane brought everyone together and got the game started. “You all live in the city of Fontanel,” she began. “Fontanel is the capital city of the kingdom of Havalard. The King resides here. You can think of Fontanel as being a European capital, like Paris or London: a bustling, humming, stinking, sprawling community that spreads far beyond the official walls of the city. There’s always lots of work for adventurers like yourselves, who want to battle evil and so on.”  
  
John looked to Sherlock, hoping to see some anticipation or curiosity, but Sherlock was poker-faced.  
  
Jane continued. “The talk of the city right now are the mysterious disappearances of people throughout Fontanel. At first, it was just urchins and prostitutes from the poorer neighbourhoods, but lately, middle-class people from other parts of the kingdom have disappeared during their visits to Fontanel. Now, John.” John noticed that, though their characters had been given names, the gamers tended to lapse and call each other by their real names, which was fine with him, as the only character’s name he could remember was Devin’s; he was playing a Gnome Barbarian, whom he called “Niblet, Destroyer of Worlds.”  
  
“John, there are a number of theories flying around about why people are disappearing, but you have heard, through your contacts in the Order of Bahamut, that the people who have disappeared are being used as sacrifices. Centuries ago, your Order battled, and supposedly eliminated, a cult dedicated to Lolth that favoured human sacrifice. Your Order suspects that this cult is in resurgence because of the locations that people were taken from.” Jane unfolded a sheet of paper, upon which was a crudely drawn map of the city. Red dots indicated where people had disappeared, and the dots formed a vaguely arachnid shape, though two legs were incomplete.  
  
“The King is a loyal worshipper of Bahamut, so he subscribes to this theory as well. He summons you to his castle.”  
  
Jane waited a moment, until everyone had vaguely nodded their assent. She went on to describe the entrance to the castle, the interior corridors, the throne room, even the tunics of the guards: “The ones you encounter at the entrance,” she said, “wear a white dragon on a blue field, the symbol of Bahamut, with the dragon’s eye represented as a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of Fontanel. The King’s closest guards and advisors, the ones in the throne room, wear a white fleur-de-lis on a blue field.”  
  
The King, Jane explained, was very concerned about the cult, and needed some brave adventurers to crush it once more, before it regained too much power. “The King’s advisors have narrowed the location of the cult’s main temple to three locations outside the city. He wants you to find the temple and, if possible, eliminate the leader of the cult. Will you take on this task?” Asking this question was apparently a formality, as few players would refuse so obvious a plot-hook.  
  
“Hell, yeah!” said Kyle. He adopted a sly, diplomatic tone. “So, uh, what kind of a… _reward_ do we get?”  
  
“The King promises you five hundred gold each if you find the temple, a thousand gold apiece if you can glean significant information about the cult, and two thousand gold apiece if you kill the leader.”  
  
Andy nodded enthusiastically, then looked to the other players, waiting for them to nod too. “Omigod,” he said, “I can totally have that staff made, the one that says ‘Bad Motherfucker’ on it.”  
  
“Wait,” said Sherlock. “I want to make sure I’m clear on this: the guards outside the throne room have the symbol of Bahamut on their tunics?”  
  
“Yes,” said Jane.  
  
“But the ones in the throne room do not.”  
  
“Correct.”  
  
“Is the King wearing any symbols of Bahamut on his person?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Are there any symbols of Bahamut in the throne room at all?”  
  
“No.”  
  
Sherlock steepled his fingers. “Is the King wearing any remarkable jewellry, talismans, anything at all?”  
  
“Make a Perception check.”  
  
Having given that instruction hundreds of times in the past, Jane had watched every single newbie gamer she’d ever encountered ask, “How do I do that again?” But Sherlock didn’t. He rolled the D20, added his Perception stat, and said, “Thirteen.”  
  
“You see nothing remarkable on him.”  
  
“So we have a geographic pattern to these disappearances. Do we have a chronological pattern?”  
  
Jane considered this for a moment. “People all seem to go missing between Friday evening and Saturday morning.”  
  
Sherlock said, “I would like to request that the King provide us with some specialised weaponry, preferably Divine in nature, so that we might more effectively smite this cult leader.”  
  
“What splat books are you using?” Kyle asked.  
  
“I beg your pardon?”  
  
“Which supplement did you find the feat ‘Brass Balls’ in? Because holy crap, dude.”  
  
“The King refuses to gift or lend you anything from his arsenal,” Jane said. Sherlock saw that she was now looking up and to the left, indicating that she was making things up on the spot, instead of down and to the right, which she’d done when she was reciting material she’d prepared. “You are, after all, fairly puny, and don’t have the ability yet to wield high-level magical weapons. And anyway, the only member of your party with Divine abilities is John.”  
  
“How about a squad of men to aid us?”  
  
Jane was stammering now. She was not prepared for Sherlock’s approach to the game. “Eh…Unfortunately, the King has no soldiers to spare, to aid you. At this time.”  
  
Sherlock said, “In that case -- what's today? In the game.”  
  
“Um, let’s say it’s Thursday.”  
  
“I tell the King that we need time to make a decision about whether we will take on this task, and we’ll return to the castle to speak to him, say, tomorrow evening.”  
  
Jane narrowed her eyes at Sherlock. “The King’s advisor informs you that the King does not receive visitors on Friday evenings.”  
  
“In that case, can my fellow adventurers and I have twenty minutes to discuss this privately?”  
  
“You may.”  
  
Sherlock led the party outside and far from the castle, and after doing a check for eavesdroppers or spies, said, “We should refuse.”  
  
“Why? Dude, it’s ten thousand gold if we kill the guy!”  
  
“The King is a ‘loyal worshipper’ of Bahamut, correct? And yet he does not appear to allow any symbols of Bahamut anywhere near him. It’s apparently important that we destroy this cult, but the King won’t provide us any help. Also, the King is not available on the night when the sacrifices are most likely taking place. Obviously the King is the leader of the cult, and he’s setting a trap for us.”  
  
There was a brief but profound silence. Jane looked particularly dismal.  
  
“What’s the matter? This is fantastic, we’ve saved ourselves a lot of time. Now we just have to find a way to neutralise the King.”  
  
Jane closed her laptop and made a show of putting her books and papers away. “That. Was. The point. Of the entire. Campaign. To eventually discover that the King was the leader of the cult, and kill him. You weren’t supposed to figure it out in the first twenty minutes!”  
  
“Then you should have made it more difficult.” Sherlock looked round the table, then leaned over to John and whispered, “I’ve done something ‘not good,’ haven’t I?”  
  
John nodded grimly. 

*****

Jane made an abrupt exit, muttering a promise to have more material ready for next week. The five men remained at the table, sharing awkward stares.  
  
Andy spoke first. “So, should one of us go and, like, comfort her, or…?”  
  
“You wish,” said Devin.  
  
“I’ll go talk to her,” John said, and stood up. “This is…the sort of damage control I have to run fairly often.”  
  
Kyle, Devin, and Andy offered to teach Sherlock to play _Settlers of Catan_ , which Devin always brought along just in case a session ran short or the Dungeon Master was ill. But when they described the game, Sherlock found it uninteresting. Instead, they asked him questions about what he did at the Crary Lab, and though every answer was a complete fabrication, he did manage to be civil.  
  
Meanwhile, John dashed down the corridor. “Jane! Hey!”  
  
Jane stopped and turned. She was livid, clutching her parka with white knuckles, but she waited for John to catch up.  
  
“I’m really sorry about what Sherlock did, spoiling your campaign,” John said. “He’s…It’s my fault, really. I thought this would be good for him. He’s not doing well here, you know that. I anticipated that he’d be rude and arrogant, but I’d hoped I could restrain him, so we could all have a good time. It never occurred to me that he would just ruin everything in one go.”  
  
Jane smiled, the way people do when they’re extremely upset. John knew that smile very well. “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she said. “What he did, honestly? Was amazing. He didn’t solve the mystery by whining until I gave him clues. He didn’t do it by being a Rules Lawyer or a Munchkin. He didn’t do it by just outright cheating…He did it by _using his brain_. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’m not used to gaming with people who think. Those other guys are cool, but they only want to know whose heads they can bash in and how much loot is in it for them. I’m going back to my room to start doing research. I’ll be back next week with something that will challenge Sherlock.”  
  
John laughed. All he could say was, “God speed.”

 

 

 

 

 _A/N: As I was writing this chapter, it suddenly occurred to me: What I should have done was have Sherlock join the D &D group, and then Sherlock makes a deduction about a death in the game, and that epiphany somehow is the key to unraveling the mystery of who killed Royer. Meanwhile, the reader would be wondering if one of the gamers was the murderer, and were they inserting clues into the game, and so on. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is what a _skilled_ writer would have done. Unfortunately, I am just a smut-peddler who occasionally wishes to pimp out my other, non-porn interests to my unsuspecting readers, so I end up haphazardly slapping together stuff like this. Oh well.  
  
Also, for you D&D nitpickers: In this and future chapters I have mixed and matched mechanics and terminology from a couple different editions of D&D, for entertainment purposes. So please try to emotionally prepare yourself for that. :)_ _  
  
Finally, thank you to XKCD for pointing out the similarity between D &D and sports teams._


	10. Chapter 10

The following week, John and Sherlock arrived for gaming, greeting four surprised faces.  
  
“We didn’t think you’d be back,” said Devin.  
  
“Yes, I could have spent the next seven hours staring at the blank wall of my room, but this seemed _slightly_ more interesting,” Sherlock said, and took his seat next to John.  
  
“Well, I’m glad you’ve decided to grace us with your presence,” Jane said. “I’ve done my homework, and this week I’m going for a slightly different approach.” She winked at John.  
  
Sherlock didn’t miss that. “What was that? What was that wink? John, did you talk to her behind my back?”  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sherlock. I’m not allowed to talk to girls, am I?”  
  
Now Sherlock was on his guard, waiting to endure something childish and cruel. But when the game began, Jane laid out another straightforward scenario, only this time without revealing so many specifics about what their first task would be. Instead, she briefly discussed with each player what their motivations were, and encouraged them to do something in the town that appealed to them. Devin’s Gnome, for example, wanted to build exotic weapons, so he visited the local alchemist.  
  
When Sherlock’s turn came round, Jane let him run free about the city, using his Bardly charm to do what Sherlock himself hadn’t been able to at McMurdo. To begin with: he knew that John’s Paladin desired a better Holy Symbol, the object through which he channeled his Divine healing spells and attacks. The plain wooden one he currently carried had no bonuses or magical effects, but he had not the funds to purchase a better one, having only the seventy-five gold pieces Jane had allotted to each person, for spending money. So Sherlock visited an artisan’s shop to see if he could acquire a nicer one for him.  
  
A lengthy, important conversation was considered an “encounter,” the same as a battle or an attempt to scale a castle wall. You had to roll a die to determine if you were sufficiently clever, charming, streetwise, or intimidating, while the character played by the DM did the same. Sherlock picked up his D20 and greeted the shopkeeper.  
  
“Good afternoon. I’m in the market for a holy symbol, specifically something suited for a Paladin of Bahamut. Can you assist me?”  
  
Jane flipped through one of her books, while ad-libbing, “Indeed sir, I believe I have just the thing. This Lawful Good holy symbol is small, but one hundred percent solid platinum, which any worshipper of Bahaumt would appreciate.”  
  
To Jane, not the shopkeeper, Sherlock said, “I’d like to examine it to see if it’s the real thing. Would that be Arcana?” He rolled the die. “Nineteen.”  
  
“It’s the real deal, solid platinum, and you perceive that when you hit with an attack that uses it, it does an extra 1d10 damage.”  
  
“Excellent.” Sherlock adopted his character-voice again. “And how much would this fine platinum specimen set me back?”  
  
As the shopkeeper, Jane said, “I like the look of you, sir. For you, a very reasonable one thousand gold.”  
  
“One thousand! I could not possibly pay such an exorbitant price. I will give you seventy five gold for it.”  
  
Sherlock’s deliberate tone told the others at the table that this was not a miscalculation or a slip of the tongue. He was offering the shopkeeper less than ten percent of what he was asking. Normally distracted when someone else was conducting boring business like this, they were newly attentive now, wanting to see what would happen next.  
  
The shopkeeper was aghast. “And why should I let you take this treasure for such a paltry sum, lowly Bard who cannot even wield it?”  
  
“Because,” Sherlock said, “I looked in the first-floor window as I came in. I know that you are a bigamist and you are hiding your second wife here above your shop, while your first wife, and three of your five children, remain ignorant of her. I also reckon that, being an artisan, you are a follower of Moradin, one of whose central tenets is loyalty to one’s clan, leaders, _and family_. If your secret were revealed, I fear your guild would reject you as quickly as your spouse.”  
  
As this was a significant attempt to intimidate the shopkeeper, Sherlock was called upon to roll his die. It came up “20,” a number as coveted among D&D players as “7” is at the craps table. A twenty meant you automatically succeeded at whatever you’d attempted.  
  
Jane laughed in shock, squeezed her eyes shut, then adopted the shopkeeper’s tone once more. “If sacrificing this item for a mere seventy-five gold is the price I must pay for your silence,” she sighed, “I will comply.”  
  
“You have my word, I will tell no one.”  
  
Jane mimed handing over the Holy Symbol, then said, “Anything else for you today, sir?”  
  
“Yes. Do you gift wrap?”   
  


*****

  
For the rest of the session, Sherlock got a bundle of kicks out of being his character, basking in the admiration of the other players as he ad-libbed and played to his character’s strengths to guarantee the most impressive achievements, reluctantly foregoing the spotlight once in a while so that the other players could do what they wished to do. Toward the end of the session, Jane reckoned, to herself, that the party could have one combat encounter before it was time to wrap up, so she gave the party a new plot-hook, describing a sudden influx of refugees to the town, from surrounding villages. Apparently, she explained, twenty or thirty miles north was an evil Wizard’s lair. In worlds such as these, one was never too far from an evil Wizard’s lair (otherwise what would adventurers have to do?), but recent activity near this particular lair had grown increasingly terrifying to the locals: mysterious green fogs, mutilated livestock, blighted crops, and so on.  
  
This time, Sherlock did not interfere with the party’s desire to take on the task of investigating the evil Wizard’s shenanigans. He was curious to see what else he could do. He hadn’t even tried to disguise himself yet. Or seduce anyone. That was a tactic he’d never resorted to as a consulting detective; it might be interesting to see how it would play out in the game.  
  
The party’s first combat encounter turned out to be an ambush; bandits had been keeping an eye on the roads used by the refugees (and now the adventurers), and took everyone by surprise -- even Sherlock did not succeed every time he rolled a die. But Sherlock enjoyed the battle, as he had an amusing Bard power, Vicious Mockery, which he could use as often as he wished. The description of the power in the book read thus: _You unleash a string of insults at your foe, weaving them with bardic magic to send the creature into a blind rage_. The target of the attack took damage, and additionally, their own next attempt at attacking was more likely to fail. Though it was not necessary to do so, Sherlock enjoyed crafting vaguely medieval insults and reciting them while he made his attack roll.  
  
When they had killed all the bandits, Jane called the game, and they adjourned until the following week. She told everyone that they had levelled up, and to come back next week with their characters at level two. 

*****

  
Gaming was always Tuesday.  
  
Sherlock did fine on Wednesday, flipping through the Player’s Handbook and carefully picking the new powers he wanted. (“ _Inspire Competence_ ,” he read aloud to John. “If only I had that power in real life.”)  
  
On Thursday, John returned from work to find Sherlock significantly less talkative and energetic, but still conversational.  
  
By Friday, he was listless and bedridden again.  
  
“Shouldn’t you at least try to make an effort to go to the Lab sometimes?” John said to the lump in the bed.  
  
“They don’t notice when I’m not there,” came the reply.  
  
“What about all the projects they’re working on there? All the research your brother went on about.”  
  
“Dull.”  
  
John frowned, disappointed in himself. He’d tried so hard, but could only cheer Sherlock for two days a week.  
  
Tuesday evening, Sherlock leapt out of bed, hungry and chatty. 

*****

  
When Sherlock and John sat down at the gaming table, they found they had interrupted an argument between Jane and her other players.  
  
“Can we fight something cool today? Being low-level sucks. You can’t fight anything but bandits and kobolds.”  
  
Jane sneered, “You’ll fight kobolds and you’ll like it. At this point, a pomeranianwould have more levels than your entire party combined.”  
  
“What _evah_ , I’m not afraid!” Devin bellowed. “I’m a Barbarian! Even at level two, I can kill a guy in one turn.”  
  
“Weak,” said Andy. “I’m a Wizard. I can kill a guy in half a turn.”  
  
“Yeah, well, I’m a Rogue,” said Kyle. “I can kill a guy _before_ my turn.”  
  
That’s when Sherlock spoke up. “Dull. I’m a Bard. I can get four idiots to kill people for me.”  
  
The others laughed. John was stunned. “Did you just make a joke?”  
  
Sherlock smiled.  
  
John turned to the others and pointed at Sherlock. “He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t make jokes.”  
  
“Really?” Kyle said. “Because I’ve always thought this dude was _hilarious_.”  
  
Jane pulled the group together and began the game. The party was still on the road to the evil Wizard’s lair, and at the end of their first in-game day of travelling, they approached a small village. They decided to spend the night there, and inquired after food and lodging at the inn. While their rooms were being made up and the party treated themselves to a few pints, they heard from the other patrons that there were some strange goings-on in the village. Specifically, people who were wandering about after dark swore they saw skeletons walking the streets.  
  
The party agreed that it would be best to get a good night’s sleep and recharge their hit points and spells, and investigate the monster problem in the morning.  
  
“Alright, everyone’s heading for bed?” Jane said. “So the night passes uneventful--”  
  
“I’d like to go out and have a look at the cemetery,” Sherlock said. “Tonight.” This earned him a few dubious looks, as wandering off on your own, especially in the middle of the night, was simply not the Done Thing in D&D.  
  
Sherlock explained himself: “This party has two armor-clad members who clank to wake the dead -- that is, the ones who are not already awake, apparently -- and a Rogue whom I don’t trust at all. Sorry to ‘meta-game,’ but I’ve heard stories about the type of characters Kyle plays, and every one of them would snatch the air from his grandmother’s lungs if he thought he could fence it. I would like to investigate the place myself, before the rest of the party tramples all over it and the Rogue steals every potentially relevant object that isn’t nailed down.”  
  
“Sounds reasonable,” Jane said, trying not to smile. “So you’re just going to make your way to the cemetery? Okay. You find the cemetery easily enough, at the edge of the village. It’s small, since the village itself is new and not particularly populous. There is, however, one exceptional feature: a large, marble family crypt. You recognise the name over the door to the crypt: it’s the last name of the mayor of the village. Also, the door is slightly open.”  
  
“I’ll examine the door before I go in,” Sherlock said. He rolled his D20. “Fifteen.”  
  
“You don’t detect any traps. The door appears to have been opened from the inside.”  
  
“Do I hear anything?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I’ll go in. I have a sunrod for light.”  
  
“Alright. The interior of the crypt is a single room, fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long. There are six slabs along the walls, four on each side and two at the back. Four of the slabs have bodies on them, in various states of decay, and three more look like they recently had bodies on them, based on the patterns of dust. In the middle of the floor is a dais upon which sits a sarcophagus decorated with elaborate carvings.”  
  
“I examine the sarcophagus.” He rolled again. “Seventeen.”  
  
“The carvings depict the life of the person within as a series of heroic exploits. The lid is not on very securely. It appears you could lift it by yourself.”  
  
“I’ll do that.”  
  
“Inside, there is no body, but there is a book.”  
  
“What sort of book?”  
  
“It’s pretty massive, like a family Bible. It’s encrusted with precious stones, and bound in leather, so far as you can tell.”  
  
“Is there a title on the cover or spine?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I’d like to open the book and read it.” As soon as he said this, he could feel all four of the experienced players tense up, with fear or possibly laughter.  
  
Jane said, slowly and with relish, “The moment you open the book to the first page and read the first word, you are blinded by a bright flash of light. You drop the book and fall unconscious. Ten minutes later, you come to.”  
  
“Ha ha, oh shit!” said Andy.  
  
“Congratulations,” said Jane, “you are now a Cleric.”  
  
“I’m a what?”  
  
“You have just levelled up, and you will do so as a Cleric, now and forever. You can keep the Bard powers you already have, but all future powers, feats, proficiencies, and so on will be those of a Cleric.”  
  
Sherlock wanted to protest, but he had no idea how. He slowly reached for the _Player’s Handbook_ , clutching one of Jane’s mechanical pencils with white knuckles.  
  
“Also,” Jane said, not looking up from her laptop, “your forehead feels funny.”  
  
Sherlock touched his forehead before he realised what he was doing. Jane continued, “You have a one-inch-long pearlescent, oval jewel embedded in your forehead. You do not yet know why.” She grinned. “But for now, the jewel will compromise your ability to disguise yourself, and ordinary people will be put off by it. So you will take a minus-two penalty to any Diplomacy check you make with someone who has no Arcane or Divine powers.”  
  
Everyone wanted to have a good chuckle at Sherlock’s expense, but at the moment he was radiating an intensity that gave them a fright.  
  
“Dude,” Kyle said solemnly, “you _never_ pick up a book like that and just read it.”  
  
Jane broke the awkward vibe by moving the game along, cutting to the following morning and the investigation by the entire group of the cemetery, which naturally ended up with a battle against some animated skeletons.  
  
John kept his mouth shut, but he wished he could tell the group that it was not the first time Sherlock had wandered off alone and gotten himself in trouble in a crypt.

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

“Don’t worry about being turned into a Cleric,” Devin said at the end of the evening, patting Sherlock on the back. “Clerics are the most interesting class to play, if you ask me, because they’re the most fucked up. Like, you can do all kinds of crazy shit, because Clerics are supposed to be completely devoted to their deities, and will do anything for them. Like this one time when I played a Cleric? I blinded myself with a red-hot poker. Because I felt that being able to see the material world was distracting, and if I wasn’t so sidetracked by it, I could more easily perceive the will of Istus.”  
  
“That campaign was so awesome,” Andy said. “I was a Wizard in that one, and you know how Wizards’ powers have a somatic element? Like, you have to make gestures to cast spells? So my Wizard was based on a white-boy rapper, and when he cast spells he made all these gang signs.” He demonstrated, trying to look menacing while shuffling rhythmically back and forth and flashing meaningless symbols with both hands.  
  
“Yes,” said Devin. “That is another reason why my Cleric blinded himself.”  
  
But Sherlock wasn’t in need of much consolation. Jane had turned out to be a formidable rival in an unexpected venue. The first week, she had inadvertently fed his ego by allowing him to impress a gang of plebes with his fearsome intellect. The second week, she let him use his imagination to indulge in what he’d missed doing most in real life for the last three months, that is, making other people look like fools and do his bidding. And the third week, she’d taken advantage of his insatiable curiosity and humbled him severely, which only served to make him more impatient for the fourth week, when he could find a way to redeem himself.  
  
But a week was a week. Lying in bed on Thursday, Sherlock felt the first inkling of lethargy. Thinking of it depressed him further, and made him want to get out of bed even less. He ignored John’s pleas to return to the Crary Lab, maybe do some data collection with the environmental scientists, out in the sunshine. Sherlock had come here to do _his_ work, not some nutter scientist’s work freezing his arse off trying to operate instruments with numb fingers under the unblinking sun.  
  
Soon, and for days on end, Sherlock would feel like nothing more than a digestive tube: a slug that drank water, at John’s urging, and then urinated occasionally, and did nothing else.

*****

  
John listened to Sherlock’s soft snores for half a minute, then carefully turned the alarm clock towards himself so he could change the time. The display, which had read 17:30, now read 18:30.  
  
“Sherlock. Sherlock. Wake up. It’s Tuesday night. It’s time for gaming.”  
  
Sherlock snuffled and turned over to look at the clock, which seemed to corroborate John’s assertion. He rolled out of bed and demanded some clothes. John provided these, and also proffered a bottle of water for him to guzzle.  
  
When they stood at the door in their parkas, ready to leave, John confessed: “I changed the clock. There’s an hour more before we need to go over to the IT building.”  
  
“What did you do that for?”  
  
“I needed to get you out of bed a little early, so I could feed you. Let’s go to the Galley.”  
  
“Kyle always brings food.”  
  
“Sherlock, if you only put one solid thing in your body all week, it’s not going to be chocolate-coveredpretzels. We’re going to have a proper meal.”  
  
As was his habit, John consumed every morsel on his tray, while Sherlock picked at his square of lasagne. He wanted to save room for chocolate-covered pretzels.  
  
John said, “When I got back from the surgery, there was a note on our door from the post office. I’ve got a package waiting for me.”  
  
“Hmm.”  
  
“No one’s emailed me telling me they’d be sending a package. Have you any got idea what it could be?”  
  
“Hmm-mm.”  
  
“They shut at five, though. I’ll have to find out tomorrow.”

*****

“I have two announcements to make,” Jane said, once the entire group had assembled. “The first involves a mistake on my part. When I designed the Wizard’s lair, it slipped my mind that some of us are not wintering over, so we need to make sure the campaign is wrapped up by the first week of February. Meeting once a week is not going to be enough to get through it. I know we all have different work schedules, but I think we can carry on with our regular Tuesday night sessions, and squeeze in some short, two-hour sessions on Thursday and Saturday nights. Does anyone have a problem with that?”  
  
Around the table, murmurs of assent. John sensed Sherlock’s body tense up and begin to hum with excitement beside him. He smiled at this fortuitous development.  
  
“The second announcement is this: I know you guys just dread the dungeons I make, because they’re full of _scaaaaary_ puzzles and you have to use your brains and everything, so this is how I’m going to make it a little more fun for you: After the campaign is over, I will buy unlimited drinks at Gallagher’s, for one night, for everyone who lives through the dungeon _and_ survives the boss fight.”  
  
This didn’t interest Sherlock or John much, but the others were all suddenly quite enthused about continuing Jane’s campaign.  
  
And so the adventurers made their way, mostly uneventfully, to the Wizard’s lair, which Jane described as being built into a foothill of a massive volcano.  
  
“One volcano?” Kyle said. “How can you have a volcano completely isolated from other volcanoes? Volcanoes have to be part of a geothermal circuit.”  
  
Jane tapped her pencil. “You live in a magical snowglobe world surrounded by infinite wackiness, where gravity doesn't work unless a Muppet in Heaven says it does. Any other questions?”  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“Good. The entrance to the lair is a ten-foot high stone door. There are no mechanisms visible to unlock or open the door. Above it, you see these words carved: ‘THE WORD IS ZARVALHU.’”  
  
“Another one of these bullshit things,” Devin sighed.  
  
John shot Devin a disapproving look. “You blokes don’t seem to have anything nice to say about the way Jane runs campaigns. Why play, if you don’t enjoy her games?”  
  
“They’re hoping that if they’re nice enough to her, one day she will let them watch her in bed with one of her lovers,” Sherlock said. When awkward silence engulfed the table, he said, “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to keep that under control.”  
  
John tried to carry on. “So the door says what over it? Zarvalhu? I’ll try saying it aloud. ‘Zarvalhu!’”  
  
“Nothing happens.”  
  
“There doesn’t seem to be a way to open it?” John said. “Can we make a Perception check?”  
  
Jane nodded, and everyone rolled. Sherlock said he would make an Arcana check instead. His roll was mediocre, so his total came out to only sixteen. “The door is magical,” Jane said, unhelpfully.  
  
“What languages does everyone speak?” Sherlock asked.  
  
Between the five of them, they spoke Common, Elven, Deep Speech, Giant, Dwarven, and Draconic. Sherlock had everyone try saying the words above the door in each of the languages, to no avail.  
  
“Does the word ‘Zarvalhu’ mean anything in any of the languages we speak?”  
  
“No,” Jane replied.  
  
“I’ll try to break the door down,” Andy said. He rolled his D20. “Twenty-seven, Strength.”  
  
“The door is solid stone and does not budge. It does, however, say ‘Ouch.’”  
  
Sherlock looked up. “Ah, hello, Door,” he said.  
  
“Hello, adventurers.”  
  
“Is there a password that opens you? Will you tell us what it is?”  
  
Jane, as the door, replied, “If you don’t know the password, you don’t belong inside.”  
  
“But you know the password?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“Do you give hints?” Kyle asked. “Like a cryptic riddle or something?”  
  
“Nope,” said the door.  
  
“You guys, let me just blow the door up. I have a spell!”  
  
Kyle said, “Andy, shut up. No you don’t. We should look for another door, or a drain or grate or something. There shouldn’t be just one entr--”  
  
Sherlock put a hand out, indicating that Kyle should be silent. Everyone sat still and watched him for a full two minutes, before Sherlock finally said, from behind his steepled fingers, “Door? Knock knock.”  
  
Jane smiled. “Who’s there?”  
  
“Zarval.”  
  
“Zarval who? Oh no! Curse you, clever adventurer!” Jane gestured with both hands, miming the door opening.  
  
“You had to trick the door into saying it,” Sherlock explained, leaning back in his chair.  
  
Unfortunately for the party, Sherlock had triumphed so stunningly, no one remembered to check for traps as they waltzed in the door, and they were all immediately plunged fifty feet down a chute to a small, square room. The room was empty, save for a large brass lever in the middle of the floor. Aside from a squat bronze door, the walls were featureless.  
  
As soon as the party dropped into the room, Jane informed them that they could hear a voice, counting down. “Twelve. Eleven. Ten.”  
  
“Oh shit,” said Andy. “Arcana check! Twenty-two.”  
  
“The voice is a Magic Mouth. You detect no other magic in the room. Nine. Eight.”  
  
Kyle said, “I’m checking for any other features or traps in the floor. Nineteen.”  
  
“You find nothing. Seven. Six--”  
  
“Someone try the door!”  
  
“Five. Four. Three--”  
  
Devin blurted, “I pull the lever.”  
  
Jane said. “There is silence for a moment. Then you hear, again: Twelve. Eleven.”  
  
“Fuuuuuuu-- okay, someone try the door.”  
  
“I’ll try to bash it in,” said Andy.  
  
“For a Wizard, you do a lot of bashing,” said John.  
  
“Not for a Half-Orc Wizard.” He rolled his die. “Oh shit. I rolled a three.”  
  
“The door is impervious to your bumbling, primitive efforts at opening it. Ten. Nine. Eight.”  
  
“Alright, someone gets lever duty. Devin. Pull the lever every time she gets to ‘Two.’ Sherlock, help me out.”  
  
“Seven. Six. Five.”  
  
“I’m thinking.”  
  
“Four. Three. Two.”  
  
“I pull the lever.”  
  
“…Twelve. Eleven. Ten.”  
  
Kyle said, “I check the door, specifically.”  
  
“For what? Nine.”  
  
“For something that will open it!” He rolled his D20. “Twenty-three, perception.”  
  
“You find nothing. The door has no handle, lock, or hinges. Eight. Seven. Six.”  
  
“Can we talk to the voice?” John said.  
  
“Five. Four.”  
  
“No, it’s a Magic Mouth ritual. It’s not intelligent.”  
  
“Three. Two.”  
  
“I pull the lever,” said Devin.  
  
“…Twelve. Eleven.”  
  
“Is anything inscribed on the lever?”  
  
“No. Ten. Nine. Eight.”  
  
“Someone make an Arcana check on the lever.”  
  
“Seven. Six.”  
  
“I rolled a twenty-five.”  
  
“I told you, there is nothing magical about the lever. Five. Four. Three. Two.”  
  
“I pull the lever.”  
  
“…Twelve. Eleven. Ten. Nine.”  
  
Andy whined, “DMs should not be allowed to watch _Lost_.”  
  
“Eight. Seven.”  
  
“Sherlock, do something! I want my free booze!”  
  
“Six. Five. Four.”  
  
“Don’t pull the lever.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Just don’t pull the lever.” Sherlock shrugged. “Let’s see what happens.”  
  
“Two. One.”  
  
Jane was silent for a moment.  
  
Then she said, “The door swings open.”

*****

Here, at the height of the austral summer, it was positively balmy, only twenty degrees below zero, Celsius. And now, at 2 AM, the sun was shining down on the faces of a smug, energised Sherlock Holmes and a pleased but exhausted John Watson.  
  
“I must confess,” Sherlock said as he bounded down the road to the dorms, with John in tow, “telling them to stop pulling the lever was a shot in the dark.”  
  
“I reckon that’s only a testament to your genius,” John said.  
  
“Not a bad fighter, either. I rebuked a grand total of twelve zombies, did you notice?”  
  
“And you punched three more.”  
  
“Yes, Rebuke Undead is the most efficient way to dispatch them, but punching the undead is also quite fun, and more satisfying.”  
  
“You might have been bitten.”  
  
“That’s what made it fun!”  
  
As they made their way into their room, John shrugged off his parka and warned Sherlock, “You’re going to end up like the others, bloodthirsty and greedy.”  
  
Sherlock still had his parka on. He put his arms around John from behind, and nuzzled his ear.  
  
“I’m already greedy.”  
  
The ice crystals that the wind had blown onto his sleeves were now melting into John’s shirt. The moment he felt the cold seeping through to his skin, John pulled away from Sherlock and yanked the shirt off.  
  
“My, my, John. We’ve hardly got the door closed and you’re tearing your clothes off for me.” He ignored John’s scowl, musing, “But then, how could you resist me? I do have eighteen points in Charisma.”  
  
John finished undressing and crawled into bed. It was so late that it was early, and he had to be back at work in five hours. “That’s as may be, but I have a Wisdom of nineteen. I know better than to have sex with you.”  
  
“Oh really?” Sherlock pulled his twenty-sided die out of his pocket. “What’s your Willpower?”  
  
John had to think for a second of what his character’s stat was. “Sixteen.”  
  
“What do you reckon would be the skill to use to seduce someone? Diplomacy? Intimidate? No matter, they’re both the same for me.” Sherlock rolled the die on the bedside table. “Twenty-seven. You find yourself strangely enamored.”  
  
“Do I?”  
  
“Yes, my unusually high Dexterity stat intrigues you. Also, my pointed ears.”  
  
John fluffed his pillow and rolled over. “Well, you better Inspire Competence, because I am so exhausted I don’t think I could get ‘enamored’ right now if I tried.”  
  
Sherlock undressed and leapt into the bed next to John, who fended off his advances with half-hearted shoves. But Sherlock wasn’t interested in John’s weak attempts at protest. He rolled onto John, pinned him, and held his wrists above his head.  
  
“Now if you want to resist me,” Sherlock said, “you’ll need to make an Acrobatics check.”

 

 

 

_A/N: The exchange about the geothermal circuit was a quote I blatantly stole from the Exalted Unofficial Wiki._


	12. Chapter 12

John stopped at the post office and showed his ID to pick up the package that was waiting for him. It was a fifteen-by-fifteen-by-twelve-inch box, solid and heavy. Had to be books, unless someone thought it would be funny to mail a cinder block.  
  
John lugged the box back to the dorms. Sherlock was in the shower.  
  
“Sherlock,” John shouted. “Are you sure you don’t know anything about this package?”  
  
No reply. John cut the box open. Inside were nine books: _Dungeons and Dragons_ _Player’s Handbook_ , _Player’s Handbook 2_ , _Player’s Handbook 3_ , _Dungeonmaster’s Guide_ , _Monster Manual_ , _Monster Manual 2_ , _Adventurer’s Vault_ , _Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons_ , and _Draconomicon: Metallic Dragons_.  
  
There were also two pads of quad-ruled paper, ten mechanical pencils, and a small velvet drawstring bag containing two sets of dice. One set was red, the other blue. Both D20s had an unusual feature: they were only numbered one to nineteen. Instead of a “20,” on each of their most coveted faces was a tiny Union Jack.  
  
At the bottom of the box was a handwritten note: _Hope these help. MH._

*****

  
The adventurers made their steady way through the Wizard’s lair, slaying monsters, solving puzzles, and (often) doing both at once. As Jane described each corridor, room, alcove, pit, enemy, attack, puzzle, and trap, Sherlock scribbled away in his new quad-ruled notebook, sometimes making lists, sometimes drawing diagrams. With so many interacting spells and powers, and so many tiny, scattered bonuses to keep track of, one of the most common phrases heard round the gaming table is “Oh shit, I forgot to add that on my last turn.” But Sherlock never forgot a bonus. Every time his turn came round, he effortlessly spelled out every point he was entitled to:  
  
“I'll cast Break the Spirit on the Destrachan. I'll use my Divine Fortune this turn, to give me plus-one to my attack roll. And since I used Blazing Beacon on my last turn, I get another plus-four. So the roll is twelve, plus my attack bonus is nine, plus one, plus four, that's twenty-six. That will hit? So that's two D8 damage plus my Intelligence modifier, which is four. And the Destrachan still hasn't saved against that Cascade of Light I cast before, so he takes an extra five damage. And John used Wrath of the Gods on his last turn, so I can add his Charisma modifier as well. Then, I'll spend my Action Point and use Command, so I can push it seven squares into that cloud of poisonous vapor, so he takes another d10, plus my Intelligence modifier again. Oh, and I can't forget my Holy Symbol. That does an extra D10. Plus all my regular bonuses...So, let's see...” Sherlock rolled four dice, added all his numbers, and said, “That comes to forty-seven damage.”  
  
Jane chuckled. “Congratulations. You've reduced the Destrachan to a fine red mist. You're all breathing in little bits of him now.”  
  
Devin said, “And he is _delicious_.”  
  
Sherlock looked down at his dice. “It's very strange. What I just did served no practical purpose, it took almost no brain power, I've gained nothing tangible, and I had only the vaguest idea of what a Destrachan was in the first place. Yet, that was quite satisfying.”  
  
“Welcome to gaming,” said Kyle. 

*****

  
Deep within the tunnels of the dungeon, the adventurers descended a long spiral of stone steps. Below, Jane told them, they could see a faint warm light. “By the time you’re halfway down the staircase, long before you can see where it is you’re going, you feel intense heat. From now on, you’ll have to make an Endurance check every ten minutes, and if you don’t succeed you’ll start to lose healing surges.”  
  
When they had reached the bottom of the staircase, Jane took up two dry-erase markers and began drawing on the plastic grid in the middle of the table, illustrating each feature she described. “This a narrow room, really more of a corridor, about a hundred and twenty feet long and fifty feet wide. The thing is, though, the floor is only about thirty feet wide, because running along the edge of this corridor is a river of lava, twenty feet wide and flowing under the wall in either direction. That’s where the warm glow was emanating from. There is a portcullis at the other end of the room, closed, of course. But from here you can see that there’s a pedestal by the door, and some type of device on the wall above the pedestal.”  
  
Before Sherlock could say “I’ll have a look at that,” Jane continued: “From out of the lava river, you see shapes emerge. Each is the length of a man, and seemingly composed of magma and cinder. As the shapes ascend, you discern that each one bears two large pincers. You see six pincers; there are three of them crawling up onto the stone floor. The creatures actually resemble scorpions, but with stumps instead of stingers.” She placed three red tokens alongside the river of lava.  
  
“Magma Claws,” Kyle sighed. “Everyone get out your Cold spells and weapons. It won’t do any extra damage, but it will slow them down.”  
  
Sherlock dashed to the opposite end of the room, so that he could examine the portcullis and its accompanying device.  
  
“The device,” Jane went on, “is composed of sixteen tiles, secured in the wall in a four-by-four grid. Below this grid is a row of four circles composed of eight holes each. The tiles are all illustrated.”  
  
Jane showed Sherlock a picture of the device:  
  
 **  
**

  
“On the pedestal below the device are four more tiles, one with a picture of a fish, one of a lobster, one of a whale, and one of a tadpole. On the back of each tile are eight thin rods.”  
  
“I see, the tiles have to be placed in the correct spaces.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And, presumably, the correct orientations.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And then, the portcullis opens.”  
  
Jane said, “Only one way to find out.”  
  
Kyle sneered, “Why would a Wizard make a lock like this, and then put the keys right next to the door, where anyone smart enough could figure out how to unlock it?”  
  
“I dunno,” said Jane. “Why would you come all the way to McMurdo and then do nothing but sit inside and play Dungeons and Dragons, when you could be out having real adventures in the Antarctic, hugging penguins and stuff?”  
  
Kyle made a face. “Have you ever hugged a penguin? They fucking _reek_.”  
  
The Magma Claws rushed towards the adventurers, disgorging lava to trap their prey, so that they might bludgeon and burn them with their claws. Meanwhile, Sherlock peered at the illustration Jane had put before him. Each tile had eight potential orientations, which ruled out trial and error, as that made for four thousand and ninety-six possible combinations. He studied the pictures, ignoring the battle going on around him.  
  
After the other adventurers had made a few valiant attempts at freezing, bashing, and piercing their enemies, Jane said, “Okay, it’s the monsters’ turn. Another Magma Claw is going to come up out of the lava.” She casually placed a new token on the grid, next to the lava river.  
  
“Oh, shit,” said Devin. What round is this?”  
  
“Three,” said John.  
  
“So we haven’t even killed one of these things yet, and every third round, another one is going to come out.”  
  
Jane pointed at the grid on the table and said, “This one nearest you, John, is going to try to immobilise you with a spew of lava.” She rolled a die. “And it hits. You’ll take five ongoing fire damage and you are immobilised. A save will end both those conditions. Unfortunately, in the meantime, this one will come up…” she moved one of the Claw tokens on the map toward John. “…And claw at you. Nine damage, plus…three more fire damage.”  
  
John noted his reduced hit points on his sheet.  
  
“Now, it would be your turn, John, but you are immobilised. Take your five ongoing fire damage. You’ll miss your action, but go ahead and make your saving rolls. Do the immobilise save first.”  
  
John rolled. “Twelve.”  
  
“Good enough. You’re no longer immobilised. Fire next.”  
  
“…Six.”  
  
“Sorry, you’re still on fire. Okay, Kyle, what are you doing?...”  
  
Sherlock wasted a lot of time looking at the device horizontally, trying to calculate the relationships between each row of fish, lobster, whale, and tadpole, to determine what the relationship between the tiles in the bottom row should be. He got nowhere, until he tried again and looked at the vertical columns. The first fish looked right, then left, then right, then left…So the last fish should be placed so it faced left, obviously.  
  
His though process was rudely interrupted by John, who demanded that Sherlock use one of his healing powers to save Andy from death, as John had been immobilised by another lava burst and was unable to help.  
  
Back to the puzzle. The fish turned from left to right and back again. But the picture could also be seen to have rotated four faces, then another four, and so on. Sherlock examined the lobster column. From the first picture to the second, the lobster rotated one face counterclockwise. In the third picture, it had rotated, yes, one face counterclockwise, again!  
  
While the rest of the party fought off the Magma Claws, of which there were now six, Sherlock drew the final four pictures, then handed the drawing to Jane. She said, “As you drop the tiles into their respective slots, you hear the clanking of machinery, and the portcullis is drawn open.”  
  
It was Devin’s turn, then. He said, “I’m running!” He moved his miniature twelve squares and through the doorway. Everyone else followed suit, some taking claw damage, if they were forced to run too close by a monster.  
  
When the entire party was out of the chamber, Andy used Mage Hand to remotely slide one of the picture-tiles back out of its slot, and the portcullis dropped again, trapping the Magma Claws inside.  
  
Sherlock looked round the table at what he found to be an utterly useless lot. “What did you poor sods _do_ in encounters like these before I joined this group?”  
  
“Mostly, we died,” said Andy.  
  
“It’s only like this when Jane runs,” said Devin. “Kyle puts us in nice empty rooms, or fields, and gives us enemies we can kill, and then we get loot, so we can have cool custom weapons made and fight bigger monsters the next time.”  
  
“And no one ever died,” Andy added.  
  
Jane said, “I died. Of boredom. And my last thought before I died was always, ‘Where _was_ that Dire Bear keeping those thirty pieces of silver?’” 

*****

  
Stretched across the corridor on his back, the young man was splattered with his own sick, and not moving. From three feet away you could smell the booze.  
  
“Are you alright?” said John, bending down to examine him. “Hello?”  
  
Heart rate and respiration were normal, at least for someone who was passed out drunk. There was nothing obstructing his breathing. If John had just stepped over him and continued on, he would not have been the first to do so that day. But the corridor was no place for him. He was slightly built, could be carried. John dropped his knapsack, kneeled down and, grasping the kid under his armpits, hoisted him for a fireman’s carry. The lift made his shoulder ache, but once the kid was settled on him, he could move easily enough down the corridor, to Jane’s room. He remembered the _Dark Crystal_ poster on her door.  
  
Jane answered the knock on her door to find John and the smelly drunk. “Er…I thought you were bringing my books and dice.”  
  
John hefted the kid. “Oh, are you not in the market for one of these? Well then, can you at least tell me which room he belongs to?”  
  
She led John two doors down. When she knocked, a roommate answered, and the three of them got him to his bunk. “This is a hell of a house call,” the roommate remarked.  
  
“Wait ‘til you get my bill,” John said. He trotted back down the corridor to pick up his bag, and opened it up to hand Jane back her copy of the _Player’s Handbook_ and a scattering of dice. “I’m sorry, we’ve had our own for a while now, but I kept forgetting to get these back to you.”  
  
“Not a problem.” She took the book and dice and gestured toward her room. “Listen, while you’re here, can I ask you something?”  
  
Jane’s room was much smaller than the one Sherlock and John shared, and through the walls, he could hear the slamming and crashing of waste disposal trucks. There was a second cot and chair in the room, but they were currently unoccupied.  
  
Before closing her door, Jane looked down the corridor in either direction, and then, seeing nobody, she said, “This is totally none of my business, but I am dying of curiosity and I just have to ask.” She sat on her bed; John continued to stand. “What are you and Sherlock together for? I mean, people hook up at McMurdo all the time who shouldn’t -- I have seen plenty of couples who manage here but who would never last a day off the ice -- but you and Sherlock were together when you came here. He’s very smart, and I’ve certainly been in groups with worse gamers. But why the hell do you put up with someone like that?”  
  
Jane impressed him; she had come from just about the most backwards, impoverished, hopeless circumstances possible in America, and had travelled eleven thousand miles to end up here, making a new life for herself in one of the strangest places built by man, in the harshest environment on Earth. But he still couldn’t help but think of her as “ordinary,” because Sherlock’s influence had made him believe the same thing that Sherlock believed: anyone who was not Sherlock or John was “ordinary.”  
  
He smiled at her, not knowing if she could tell that it was a smile of pity. There was a Sherlock that Jane would never know. Well, if she knew all about the real Sherlock, she would probably continue to be mystified by John’s tolerance of him. But there was a _Sherlock-and-John_ that she would never know.  
  
Standing there, John flashed back to the time he stood in the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the railing digging into his ribcage as he struggled to keep ahold of Sherlock, who was dangling over the side. His shoulder burned with the strain, and he’d felt as though his old wound would tear open again, and the titanium plate and rod inside would spring out. But as he clutched John’s wrist with both hands, Sherlock whispered, “You can’t let go, John. I love you.”  
  
And across the Gallery, the Metropolitan police sniper heard it.  
  
Then, he thought of what had happened later that same evening, when they had made love for the first time. Oh, it wasn’t the first time they’d _had sex_. But it was the first time that Sherlock had looked into his eyes the way he had; the first time he wrapped his arms and legs around John and just clung to him; the first time Sherlock, usually vocal and demanding in bed, had been silent, almost reverently so; the first time John’s stomach had dropped at the realisation of what they were doing, what they were _really_ doing, and how any time they did this could be the last.  
  
All this flicked through John’s mind in an instant, but he said nothing about it. Instead, he told Jane, “Being invalided home from Afghanistan was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Everything was taken away from me, and in return I got a cane and a pension I couldn’t live on. I had doctors and nurses and physical therapists, to fix my shoulder. Then I had counselors and therapists and support groups to fix my head. And when I walked down the street, well, don’t tell me you don’t see people with canes and feel sorry for them, for being broken. I’d been so powerful and respected, a doctor and a solder, and then suddenly I was less than nothing. Until I met Sherlock. He saw the cane first, like everyone does, but he also saw everything else, instantly. He saw who I had been, who I _was_. And he said -- he didn’t actually say this in words, but he communicated it to me -- he said, ‘I am not going to try to fix you, because _you are not broken_. All I ask is that you please extend me the same courtesy.’”  
  
Jane’s eyes darted back and forth, occasionally meeting John’s. “So…your relationship is based entirely on both of you being fucked up and refusing to do anything about it.”  
  
John was now smiling defensively. “That makes it sound much less romantic. But where you’re from, don’t people think you’re sick for loving who you love? Haven’t you had people try to fix you when you know you’re not broken?”  
  
As soon as he said it, he regretted it, as Jane turned away and refused to look at him.  
  
“Thank you for answering my question,” she snapped. “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time about it. I’ll see you Tuesday, alright?”  
  
John cleared his throat. “Of course.” Jane wasn’t making a move to see him out, so he just left. “Cheers,” he said softly, as he closed the door.  

*****

  
The party agreed that the door they were standing in front of was probably the one that would lead them to the final fight against the evil Wizard. Jane had gone out of her way to describe the antechamber in great detail, and had hinted rather heavily that they might want to rest at this point, and recharge their hit points and spells. There was excitement, but also trepidation, as articulated by Devin, who said, “You guys, do you think it’s a bad sign that the door resembles the gaping maw of an otherworldly creature, and it’s surrounded by relief carvings of tentacles?”  
  
Jane’s attempt to describe the this climactic setting with flair and drama was significantly hindered by the agitated players, who constantly interrupted her to argue about such important subjects as which were stalagmites and which were stalactites. Also, leading up to the big reveal, Andy continually bleated, “It’s going to be a Mind Flayer, isn’t it? Is it a Mind Flayer?”  
  
John had no idea why Mind Flayers were such dreaded creatures, but Sherlock had read the _Monster Manual_ , so he was familiar. While Andy and Kyle bickered about their plan of attack, and Devin announced that he was changing his alignment to Chaotic Annoyed, Sherlock explained to John that they were monstrous humanoids, notoriously tricky to defeat, who enslaved the minds of some beings and devoured the brains of others.  
  
John asked, “So are we more likely to be enslaved, or eaten?”  
  
Sherlock said, “Yes.”  
  
The evil Wizard did indeed turn out to be a Mind Flayer. As was customary, he was accompanied by numerous thralls, in this case four blind, savage Grimlocks and three War Trolls. The Mind Flayer continually manoeuvered so that it was always shielded by at least one thrall. Once safe and secure, it used its Mind Blast power to hurl massive amounts of psychic damage at the party, dazing them so their movements and abilities were severely limited. John and Sherlock were so preoccupied with healing the other three party members, they had no opportunities to attack. Meanwhile, Kyle, Devin, and Andy chipped away at the hit points of the thralls. Even if they managed to take out one that was protecting its master, the Mind Flyer would simply teleport to safety and continue his psychic barrage.  
  
Little by little, the party was losing hit points faster than they could regain them, and they were fast running out of spells. “This isn’t working!” Devin finally said, tossing his pencil and pushing his book and sheet away from him in frustration. “Jane made this stupid-hard so she wouldn’t have to buy us drinks.”  
  
Sherlock examined the maps in his notebooks. “We have to try another approach.” He counted squares and drew new lines. Then he cursed himself, under his breath, “Of course, why didn’t I see it before?” He tore two sheets out of the notebook and held them both up to the light, one over the other. He showed the two sheets to Jane, pointing something out, and Jane nodded.  
  
“Does anyone have a spell or a ritual that lets you create a wall of stone, or something comparable?”  
  
Everyone shook their heads. Then Andy said, “I have Wall of Ice…?”  
  
“How much ice can you create?”  
  
Andy ran through the specifics of the spell. “That will do,” Sherlock said. “Save that. Do not use it until I tell you to. Kyle and Devin: don’t hit those two thralls next to the Mind Flayer. Let him stay right where he is. We don’t want him to teleport. John and Andy: I need you to figure out all the spells at your disposal that you could use to damage the ceiling directly above the Mind Flayer. Anything ranged that uses force, or a pulse.”  
  
“Got it,” said Devin. “What are we doing? Crushing him under stone?”  
  
Fortunately for the group, when Jane tried to make the Mind Flayer teleport, she rolled poorly and could not recharge its power. Being an honest DM, she kept him where he was, while John directed Radiant Pulse at the ceiling, and Andy used Mordenkainen’s Sword. They called out their damage: “Thirty-six.” “Twenty-nine.” Jane described the spray of stone shards, but nothing seemed to be falling on the Mind Flayer and crushing him, so the party began to despair again. Then, Andy cast Force Orb, and did the final twenty-five points of damage that Jane deemed necessary.  
  
“You punch a whole through the stone, and are immediately hit by a blast of heat as lava comes pouring through. The Mind Flayer is directly under the flow, and is instantly disintegrated beneath the sulphurous tide.”  
  
“You mean we killed it? We just killed it?”  
  
“Yes. However, when the lava hits the ground, it splashes, doing…eighteen damage to anyone whose AC is lower than twenty-five. The chamber is now quickly filling with lava.”  
  
“Time to run like hell,” Kyle said.  
  
John asked, “Are we going to be able to get out before the lava engulfs us?”  
  
“That is why,” Sherlock said, “once we’re out of this room, Andy needs to cast Wall of Ice in front of the door. Before we continue that running that Kyle mentioned.”  
  
Jane could have instigated an argument about how resistant a five-foot-thick wall of ice would be to a flood of lava. Instead, she simply said, “You guys can move twelve squares per round, the lava can move thirteen, but the ice will hold out for twenty rounds, and the lava will stop flowing once it’s ascended about forty feet, so…go go go go go.”  
  
She did make Sherlock use his maps to navigate the party through the maze of rooms and corridors, and calculated their movements versus the flow of the lava, but only because she knew they could do it.  
  
When they reached the surface, Jane gave her gamers a very satisfying description of the destruction of the lair. “Turns out,” she said, “it was one of those load-bearing bosses. Without his malign powers to sustain it, the lair crumbles into the face of the mountain, and parts of it are likely being sucked back into the respective planes of existence from which they came. You have earned the eternal gratitude of the entire kingdom, and in addition to great riches, you will likely get Gene Simmons levels of poon-tang for the rest of your mortal existence. The End.”  
  
“And what about _after_ my mortal existence?” Devin asked.  
  
“Garl Glittergold, patron deity of all Gnome-kind, will provide,” Jane said.  
  
Sherlock was unsatisfied. “It seems like the lair collapsing would compromise some of those lava flows, possibly causing them to redirect into that densely-populated valley. Oh wait. Let me see if I care.” He rolled his D20. “Hmm. No.”

  
  
  
  
_A/N for D &D nitpickers: I am aware that Mind Flayers tend to be Sorcerers, not Wizards. Originally I intended the final boss to be a Lich (who are more likely to be Wizards), but then I realized I would have to explain what a Lich is, and whether the lava would have destroyed the phylactery, blah blah blah, and that's more difficult than just having a Mind Flayer._


	13. Chapter 13

John didn’t bother removing his parka when he returned to the dorms after work. He didn’t even bother closing the door. He shoved Sherlock’s parka at him and commanded, “Put your coat on.”  
  
Sherlock looked at the coat like he didn’t know what it was for, then looked at the clock. “We don’t need to leave for fifteen minutes.”  
  
“When I passed someone outside,” John said breathlessly, “they told me they saw our names on the manifest that was just posted outside the Galley. We’re scheduled to leave the day after tomorrow.”  
  
Now Sherlock was putting on his parka obediently. “You wouldn’t joke with me about something like that?”  
  
On a corkboard outside the Galley, manifests were going up every day, and, notoriously, being constantly revised and updated. The summer was coming to an end, and McMurdo’s operations were winding down for the coming darkness. Soon, the population of twelve hundred would be reduced to two hundred. But weather conditions, admin errors, soft runway ice, and politics all had a hand in delaying some people’s exits for weeks.  
  
But for now, John and Sherlock gazed upon their names on the manifest with awed silence and a churn of emotions. Then, without saying another word, they continued down Highway 1 to Gallagher’s.  
  
They’d arrived early; the other gamers probably wouldn’t show up for another ten minutes. The booths could seat six, if they were all very, very good friends, but John opted to push two tables together, and arrange six chairs around them. There, the two of them asked the waitress for glasses of water, and waited.  
  
Devin showed up first, and sat across from Sherlock. At about the same time, a provocatively dressed and slightly inebriated woman sidled up to John, a cigarette between her fingers. “Have you got a light?” she purred.  
  
John was confused by her for a moment, thinking, _What are you, new?_ _Don’t you realise who you’re trying this on with?_ He said flatly, “Sorry, don’t smoke.”  
  
Sherlock leaned over, so he could look past John at the woman, and chided, “You shouldn’t do that. It may be bad for your health.”  
  
The woman held her cigarette defiantly aloft. “ _May_ be?” she snapped. “I think the evidence is pretty conclusive, but guess what: I don’t care.”  
  
“Em…he means,” John said, “that you shouldn’t try to get off with me when he’s around. _That_ may be bad for your health.”  
  
“Are you threatening me?” she said, her voice tinged with that distinctly American air of entitlement and litgiousness.  
  
“Also, your untreated Hepatitis C,” Sherlock deadpanned. “That may be bad for your health.”  
  
The woman was so flustered, when she tried to make a dramatic, huffy exit, she succeeded only in knocking her chair over as she stood up. She paused, considering whether she should pick it up, decided against it, and left the bar entirely. John righted the chair, and just then Kyle showed up to take it.  
  
“It’s your accents,” he explained. “Chicks love British accents.”  
  
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what it is,” Sherlock said. “It couldn’t be because we’re both exceedingly physically attractive, interesting, intelligent, polite, and charming.”  
  
“Yes, polite and charming,” John deadpanned.  
  
Sherlock said, “Well, I meant _collectively_. Between the two of us, we have politeness and charm.”  
  
Andy showed up next, getting compliments all the way from the door on his shirt that said “Party ‘Til The Sun Goes Down.” But of course, it was Jane’s arrival that everyone at their table was anticipating, so that she could get a tab started.  
  
As soon as she’d sat down at the table, the guys all spelled out their precise plans for what they would drink and in which order. They knocked back vodka, shot after shot of tequila, and litres of Export Gold. As the evening wore on, the place filled up, got loud, and a band took to the tiny stage and plowed through Eagles covers and a few unmemorable original compositions.  
  
The conversation touched very little on their D&D exploits. Instead, the gamers gobbled taquitos and buffalo wings as they led Sherlock and John through a labyrinth of strange, intersecting subcultures, including much speculation about whether Lady Gaga played _Warhammer 40,000_.  
  
“Did you see that outfit she wore in the ‘Alejandro’ video?” Devin yelled over the band. “She looked exactly like a Sister of Battle.”  
  
Kyle waved his tumbler at Devin, spilling his Stolichnaya. “No way, dude, she is Orky as fuck. You know how in that song she sings, _WAAAGH, WAAAGH, fashion baby_...”  
  
“I don’t know about that, man. I can’t really picture Lady Gaga with green skin riveting sheet metal to herself.”  
  
“Then you obviously know _nothing_ about Lady Gaga,” Kyle slurred.  
  
Hours later, when her triumphant adventurers could drink no more, Jane got out her bank card and examined the receipt only briefly before handing both back to the waitress.  
  
With Devin and Andy off being sick in the toilet and Kyle seconds from passing out at the table, John and Sherlock stood, only slightly wobbly from their paltry three drinks apiece, and John said, “It has been a lot of fun, but we should be going. Big day tomorrow, you know.”  
  
“Oh that’s right, you guys are leaving on Tuesday, huh?” Jane stood to say her goodbyes.  
  
“I hope so,” John chuckled. “That’s what it says on the manifest. What about you guys? Are you all wintering over?”  
  
“Kyle is, but my mom wants me to come home. I’m sure I’ll be back, though.” Jane pivoted to stand before Sherlock, not at all intimidated by the fact that he was a full eight inches taller than her.  
  
“You cost me a lot of money tonight, Sherlock,” she said sternly. But then she broke out in a grin, and held her hand out for him to shake.  
  
Sherlock looked down at her, and though he moved not a muscle on his face, John could see fondness brimming underneath his smug gaze. “You were a worthy adversary,” he said finally, and gave her the tiniest of bows, before turning on his heel and heading for the door.  
  
Jane dropped her hand and watched him go. “That’s the goodbye I get?” she said to John. “After all we went through together? I gave him the best weeks of my life! All those puzzles I lovingly crafted for him!”  
  
“You have no idea,” John said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “That was the most respectful, affectionate thing I’ve ever heard him say to a woman.” He cleared his throat. “So. What’s the damage on the drinks?”  
  
“Oh, yes.” Jane uncrumpled the receipt and showed it to him. The total was well into the triple digits. John happily got out his wallet and reimbursed her, rounding up the nearest hundred.  
  
“Thank you so much for all you’ve done,” he said. “He wouldn’t have survived here if it weren’t for game nights.”  
  
Jane pocketed the cash. “Think nothing of it. That’s what DMs are for.”  
  
“Just out of curiosity,” John said, “how many extra rooms did you have to add to the dungeon?”  
  
“Originally I wrote twelve, but by the end there were thirty-eight. I was up until three AM every damn day. He was just plowing through them. But it was great. We all had a blast.”  
  
This time when she held her hand out, she got a shake, and John tugged her toward him to turn it into a hug. “I honestly can’t thank you enough,” he said.  
  
“I’m sorry for what I said the other day,” Jane said. “I really do hope you two are happy together. I’m sure there’s something about him that I just can’t see.”  
  
She started to let go, then hugged John again tightly. “That one’s for him, from me, okay?”

*****

  
The belly of the C-17 opened for the sixty figures mummified in bright orange. They didn’t shuffle and waddle quite so much as they had when they’d arrived, having gotten accustomed to wearing their ECW. Sherlock and John plodded along with this crowd, duffel bags slung over their shoulders.  
  
Once inside the plane and snugly strapped in, Sherlock immediately pulled out the _Player’s Handbook 3_ and began to read.  
  
“I would have thought you’d be done with that,” John said, “now that we’re going back to real life.”  
  
“I thought so too,” Sherlock replied, “but look at all these classes and races I haven’t played. I could be a Githzerai.”  
  
John took one last look through the rime of ice on the window, at the flat, barren runway with its three little shacks nearby. He remembered a time, God, it seemed like forever ago, when that was what he thought Antarctica was going to be like for them.  
  
John napped for two hours, and woke to find Sherlock still devouring the book.  
  
“What did you say to Jane after I left Gallagher’s?” Sherlock said, as soon as he sensed John was awake.  
  
“Hm? Oh, I just told her to take care of herself.”  
  
Sherlock tuned a page. “And what did she say to you?”  
  
“She told me to take care of you.” John rotated his head to get the crick out of his neck. “Because she couldn’t imagine that anyone else would ever be able to.”  
  
  
 **FIN.**


End file.
